Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene

Urban India produces 69 million tons of waste annually, most of which is dumped, causing hazards to public health. In collaboration with Hasiru Dala and I Got Garbage, this project will prototype waste picker-owned franchises to collect, compost and recycle up to 85% of waste. A mobile metrics tool will track operations to develop a rapidly replicable model.

High equipment costs prohibit the appropriate incineration and safe disposal of medical waste for many hospitals in resource-poor countries, leading to contaminated supplies and sharps being landfilled or dumped on roadsides, infecting animals and people with agents that can lead to sepsis, hepatitis and HIV.  A modular, low-cost incineration system developed by this project will be locally built and adapted to meet hospital waste disposal needs.

We turns human waste into solid fuel and sell it to cement plants and other industries. Our approach represents urban Africa’s first financially viable solution to human waste treatment, transforming a cost burden into a profitable enterprise.

lastic casings and in low-cost diagnostic devices offer many advantages during the fabrication and manufacturing of the device, but are a big challenge to bio-hazard waste management after the devices are used. We address these challenges by developing a cheap all biodegradable substitute (and one that can be incinerated) for plastic.

TakaTaka Solutions collects waste from lower income households and turns the organic waste into high quality bio-charcoal. This leads both to a waste-free environment as well as providing households with an emission free energy source for cooking.

The project intends to use organic waste for production of biogas for cooking or electricity generation. Uncontrolled waste in urban slums that is often washed into drainage channels causing flooding and breeding sites for waterborne diseases and mosquitoes will be used as a resource. Click HERE to Download the photos below. [caption id=""attachment_7986"align=""aligncenter"width=""300"caption=""Uncollected waste from a Ugandan slum clogs drainage channels and provides a risk of flooding.

Worldwide, 1.1 billion people practice open defecation, resulting in diarrheal diseases – a leading cause of death among children under five.  This is a major problem among rural Tanzania’s Maasai people.  This project will engage and train local youth and community members in scientific data collection to guide development of locally conceived, implemented and evaluated sanitation solutions to open defecation.

An increasing number of people are living on water and without access to sanitation. Diarrheal incidence and child mortality are higher in floating villages than in land communities. The HandyPod is an innovative treatment system, using two-stage sequestration and treatment that includes aquatic plants, that is addressing the challenge of providing effective sanitation to floating communities. Technical support, marketing and sales training are provided to entrepreneurs who can scale up access to sanitation.

Matadi city inhabitants rely on septic tanks. Human excreta are directly discharged into rivers without pre-treatment. The same water is used to water vegetables, therefore spreading pathogens within the population. We have initiated the biological treatment of these wastewaters with Vetiveria zizanoides prior to their discharge into the natural rivers.

A novel rice husk-fired furnace developed by this project will sterilize human excreta and produce a safe agricultural fertilizer. The efforts include a sustainable business model to creating market demand and sales to farmers in Tanzania, a country where only 24% have improved sanitation facilities.