Work down here in Chile

Despite popular belief, I am working down here in Chile. We are working very hard actually, and making a lot of progress recently. So here is a long discription of the work I am doing down here in Chile

Step 1: Background

You may or may not know but the world is in a serious sanitation crisis. It’s hard to believe that 2.6 BILLION people (half of the developing world) lack access to even the most basic latrines, and are left only to the great out doors to handle their personal business. This use to not be a problem, our world is amazing at being able to break down people’s leftovers, and what came from the earth can be naturally be returned to the earth BUT thanks to urbanization in the last 200 years more of the world’s population are living in closer and closer proximity. Our earth can not naturally break down that much waste so condensed together. Beside this being a problem due to smell, eye sores and just a hassle to deal with that much crap, the real problem is due to the bacteria and parasites that are found in human fecal matter that are killing thousands DAILY around the world. 3.5 million people die from diarrheal disease every year attributed to poor sanitation and drinking water. This is also the #1 killer for children under 5 years old. Specifically in fecal matter intestinal worms such as Ascaris are extremely resilient and hard to break down, and therefore over 1 billion people are affected by these Ascasris worms right NOW.

These numbers are hard for us to process, but after visiting Mungoa-goa, a village in Cameron Africa and meeting people who spend their whole lives drinking water from the stream that other people poop in and seeing their pain and suffering, after seeing so many little beautiful children constantly coughing, throwing up and seeing the de-hydration from so much diarrhea, I became deeply connected to this sanitation crisis. This past year while working in Atlanta for Georgia Tech Research Institute I got to work on a Solar Latrine project. Basically, and idea was given us to use the heat from the sun to heat human fecal matter hot enough to kill off everything in, even these extremely resistant intestinal worm eggs called Ascaris. We developed some prototypes and got to present in Washington D.C. at the Smithsonian where we took home first place.

Step 2: Start up Chile

The Chilean Government is looking for more and more ways to make Chile a 1^st world country, to develop every part of the country, to connect it to the world and show everyone that they are different from other countries in South American. And they are doing some incredible programs to reach that goal. The Start-Up Chile program is designed to increase business, specifically international business, and foster an entrepreneurship culture here in Chile (the Silicon Valley idea). So they have invited the world community to come start business here in Chile, offering a $40,000 grant to get the business started as well as plenty of resources, mentorship and community to start a business. 4 friends and I, all recent grads, applied for the program back in February with the solar latrine idea. We knew that for the Solar Latrine idea to go anywhere, we needed to break apart from the university and try some real field testing, and, we got in. We started a company called Sanivation (check us at Sanivation.com), Sanivation is “innovation in sanitation” (get it? ha), our goal is to provide novel solutions for the world’s sanitation crisis. Awesome.

Step 3: Moving to Chile

July 12^th all 5 of us said goodbye to the US, not sure of when we would be back, and headed down to Santiago Chile. We quickly found an apt. to live in and were amazing how fast Chile became home. The first couple months were spent really figuring out the world sanitation needs. We spent a lot of time reaching out to people around the world learning from them, we read a million papers, traveled to many places in Chile to see and understand the range of sanitation here. We needed to become sanitation experts. At this time we were comparing technology possibilities and possible business models. For me this was the first time that I had to think about how sanitation could be a business, that providing toilets for the poorest of poor could actually make money. Apparently money doesn’t grow on trees, and grants run out- so for anything in this world to be lasting, there has to be lasting money exchange.

That time learning was frustrating because I am a “doing” person, but it was important. I learned a ton about sanitation, what is currently being done, learned a lot about business, and got my mind thinking bigger and more outside of the box. It was end of October when we realized that a personal solar toilet may not work, it’s to expensive, spends too much time just sitting instead of making money. So we turned instead to community sanitation centers. Currently around the world developed cities’ waste is shipped in pipes via water and pumps to some kind of giant treatment center. In the US, our government pays billions of dollars a year to keep the infrastructure and daily operation needed to keep our system running. Most places can not do this. Way to expensive, way too much expertise required, far too much infrastructure needed. So what do they do? Well most slums in the world have low income workers come and manually remove fecal matter from a holding tank with shovels and carry the family’s shit away and dump it where ever it is convenient for them. Out of site out of mind. Gross, I know.

To battle this many NGOs are creating better toilets, better ways to store the waste so it is better contained and helping to set up easy ways to collect and transport the fecal matter. But then where do they put it? Most don’t know what to do with it. The idea of biogas is getting more and more popular but it has tons of problems and requires high expertise with minimal return on investment. That’s where our community solar treatment center comes in. We would provide a local, safe, cheap place for fecal matter to be transported to. Then in only a day, the fecal matter is safe to put anywhere, and best to be placed on local farms and used as a safe, organic soil amendment.

Step 4: Proving our design

So, a great idea right? Well we are now proving that it is not an idea, but a working product. So we have designed a parabolic solar collector, lets call it a Shit Cooker, and have been testing it to be sure that it hits high enough temperatures.

Our Current Shit Cooker

Basically how it works is the black cylinder is placed in a toilet and you poop into it. It will have a ventilation pipe for smell, and designed right so it is easy and comfortable for people to use. When full, it is capped and then moved to the sanitation center, placed on one of these parabolic mirrors and in one afternoon, it heats up over 60C and kills off all pathogens, then can be sold as fertilizer. The Diagram below will show the system idea for ya.

So, in order to prove this guy works we have been doing MANY temperature tests using fecal matter from all kinds of animals (easier to collect than humans). We are working with a veterinarian university, and so we go to their zoo, and shovel whatever poop we want, and bring it back to our prototype to load it. So, yes, I have collected everything from dog, to cow to emu poop over the past couple weeks. Yummy. (no that is not dirt in our prototype here to the left)

We also need to prove biologically that this will kill off all the parasites and bacteria. So we have been trying long and hard to somehow get some Ascaris eggs. It is harder that you would think. We found that a cousin of the Ascaris egg (found in humans) is Toxocara, found in dogs, specially is very common in puppy poop. So, Andrew and I got to chase down stray puppies for a while in Santiago collecting their shit. Luckily the dog kennel here on the vet campus got a batch of puppies just when we needed it most and their poop was full of Toxocara eggs! YIPPY! Then we took plenty of other studies in how to isolate these eggs, and developed our own procedure where we now have over 40,000 eggs in our stock solution. This is what our precious eggs look like under our microscope after they have incubated.

Yes, this worm hatches in people's intestines

Now comes the fun part. We are putting these isolated eggs into our own “tea bags”. Basically using a porous latex material that has holes small enough to keep eggs in, but large enough to let most of the environment (air and liquids, and mainly heat) in and out we glue them into little baggies holding our eggs!

These tea bags are then placed in a lot of animal crap and into our prototype. We then “bake” it all. Let the solar concentrated do it work, at the end of the day remove the tea bags, open them up, grab a sample from the inside, make a slide and examine it with the microscope and see if the eggs have all been destroyed. Crazy hun? But kinda fun. And very busy.

Meanwhile, while all the lab work is going on, we are re-designing our prototype, making is better to work with, fixing little details. We are also working with a huge NGO down here, called Techo Para Chile who has been vital for us getting to know slums here in Chile. We have visited many of them around Santiago, and will be working with Techo to design a field prototype and hopefully implement in a slum soon so we can get user feed-back. And not to mention, will get to help out a community badly in need of sanitation reform! So I will update on that soon. There is also a couple other possibilities for installation around chile- but to be honest, we don’t want to stay in Chile. I love it here, but 98% of this country has working sanitation. This isn’t where this project belongs. So we are totally making use of our time down here: working with people in the field, visiting slums, lab work, designing, building AND we also are looking for other opportunities to figure out what is next after Chile. We are talking to many huge sanitation groups around the world, as well as other possible implementation or business grants. The plan is to figure out where we can get money to be, and a real place we can implement and work with and go there in August/ September for field testing. Our biggest opportunities right now are south east Asia and Sub Sahara Africa.

So things are well. I am working hard, despite popular opinion, and we are making great progress.