The Price of Public Sanitation

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times featured the "Portland Loo", a public toilet model used and marketed by the city of Portland, OR. The Portland Loo solves many of the problems associated with urban public toilets in the United States: cleanliness, graffiti, damage, and facility abuse. The....

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Transforming Twitye

SOIL's Port-au-Prince composting site at Twitye is undergoing a complete transformation. It's a makeover, SOIL style! Given SOIL's mission to transform wastes into resources, the team decided that our site at Twitye, the infamous Port-au-Prince dump, provided an ideal opportunity to take that....

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September 2012 Newsletter: Where's the Restroom?

Dear friends, Every morning across Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haitien, SOIL toilet managers wake up early to unlock the SOIL public toilets in their communities and make sure they're clean and stocked with toilet paper and shredded peanut husks or sugar cane (used to "flush" an eco toilet). Throughout....

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"Closing the Loop, Transforming the Poop"

SOIL has launched a campaign with Trees Water People to plant 10,000 trees in Haiti in the coming year with SOIL's own humanure compost. This project is part of our EcoSan initiative to not only collect and treat human waste, but to reincorporate it back into the earth, increasing productivity with....

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Nourishing the Planet Saturday Series: An Interview with SOIL Executive Director

Written by Olivia Arnow for Nourishing the Planet on August 25, 2012 Bio: Kramer is the co-founder and executive director of SOIL, a nonprofit organization in Haiti dedicated to protecting soil resources by providing ecological sanitation services and turning human waste into nutrient-rich compost....

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A Visit From Vic!

SOIL was lucky enough to host Vic Hinterlang, a photojournalist and good friend of ours, for a few days in July. Here are his reflections on his time with SOIL, along with some of his amazing photographs! I first spent time with SOIL in January 2011 when I traveled to Haiti to document the one year....

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Fertilize Your Plants With Pee!

Hello SOIL supporters! As an Ecological Sanitation (EcoSan) organization, one of the aspects of the work we do is to reincorporate the nutrients harvested from our bodies and, after treatment, return them to the soil. At our farms here in Haiti we are continually conducting agricultural experiments....

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Press Release: Cell Phone Powered Poop Tracking Advances Haiti Waste Treatment

The SOIL team is going high tech, using smart phones to streamline poop collection and compost production. Our friends and collaborators from re.source have helped develop a system for SOIL, using an open source data collection platform called Open Data Kit, to record and track all of the composting....

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Getting Down to Business: Cell Phone-Powered Poop Tracking in Cap Haitien

Business efficiency isn't something that often comes up when discussing ecological sanitation. Most people talk about waste collection, transportation, ideal composting temperatures, cover material, pathogen die-off....the list goes on. However, business is an incredibly important aspect of....

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SOIL's New Digs!

SOIL moved into a new office in Port au Prince in July and we wanted to share some photos of our new digs. We have come full circle since the earthquake and moved back into the house where SOIL Port au Prince started, formally known to many as the coalition house. When Nick, Bobo, Paul and I came to....

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