Toilets in Haiti and Circular Runways

Companies and research initiatives around the world are developing and testing new toilets that can collect human urine and turn it into fertilizer. These urine diversion toilets have been implemented in places like South Africa with mixed results. However, researchers in Sweden are using portable toilets to gather the urine, dry it into fertilizer pellets that are then used to grow barley for beer. This work could show how to implement these kinds of toilets on a large scale.

A nonprofit in Haiti called SOIL with a business arm called EkoLakay is bringing back the old-fashioned idea of a container-based sanitation system. Customers rent toilets with containers in them, use them, and return them to EkoLakay to then be converted into highly nutritious compost. Piloted in 2011, the program has been successful serving more than 1,000 households (growing by 40 every month) with a staff of 58 mostly local workers. They attribute their success to using "applied resilience thinking", having many actors at different levels, and constantly adapting to new solutions and knowledge.

In many rural communities in India, access to clean drinking water is still scarce. The cost of bottled water is prohibitive, city pipes are in poor condition, and the municipal tanker trucks that supply some water are haphazard. But a social business called Sarvajal is busy scaling up a solution: a water ATM. These machines allow people to scan a pre-paid card and withdraw purified water from a stable, convenient source within their community when needed.

Sub-Saharan Africa faces significant challenges in two areas that previously may have been considered in separate spheres: lack of access to sanitary waste disposal, and a growing need for clean, affordable energy. Now, several companies are scaling solutions for how each of these issues actually solve the other. In Kenya, they are finding ways to turn human waste into fuel and fertilizer, effectively addressing both issues simultaneously.

Local agencies tasked with controlling disease-spreading organisms are releasing sterile male mosquitoes to help reduce the pest’s population and prevent the spread of dengue. This strategy has decreased the mosquito population by about 82% in parts of Southern California, marking the first time in eight years that the population has declined instead of increased.

Distilleries and pharmacies in Vermont have begun making hand sanitizer, in order to help mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. Although this does take away from the typical function of the businesses and doesn't result in revenue, the state is helping to cover costs of production so that all bottles can be donated to emergency responders, grocery store workers, and other at-risk people.

Several distilleries across the U.S. are shifting gears from producing beer to instead producing hand sanitizer to play a part in addressing the coronavirus pandemic. Combatting the shortage of the product, while also promoting better hygiene, distilleries are experimenting with recipes based on federal and World Health Organization guidelines and giving the product to patrons as well as donating to charities.

Bhutan has committed to eliminating malaria from the country, as in on track to do so thanks in part to the Bhutanese government's consistent persistence to raise public awareness. Arming citizens with mosquito nets, spray and education, the small country has now outpaced India towards this public health goal.

In Senegal, emptying your septic taste is expensive business; the two options, hiring someone to shovel it onto the street or paying a high price to the "cartel of 'toilet suckers,'" are not sustainable for residents or public health. To force members of the raw sewage cartel to compete with each other and lower prices, a new call center "auctions" the service by text to individual sellers instead of forcing people to contend with a banded group, and "prices for toilet suckers have come down an average of 7 percent" since the program began.

Abel Cruz "catches" clouds on his fog net farm to help provide free water for his community in a slum on the outskirts of Lima, where access to water is very limited and costly. While this solution may never compete with large scale and traditional technologies, many argue there is enormous potential for this simple concept in certain, rural areas of the world.