112 results for tag: compost
SOIL Returns to Its Roots
SOIL Explores the World’s Largest EcoSan Project and Reunites with Heroes
Co-written by Sasha Kramer and Anthony Kilbride See all the photos from South Africa on SOIL's Flickr page.
Sasha: SOIL Returns to It's Roots
Seven years ago, in a country more than 7000 miles from Haiti the seeds that would later become SOIL were carefully collected. I had first visited South Africa in 2005 before starting SOIL and it was that visit that inspired my passion for ecological sanitation. During that first visit I attended an ecological sanitation conference in Durban where I had the honor of meeting some of the leaders in the field of converting waste into ...
SOIL Visit to EAA, Ouagadougou
This is one story from a multi-part series on SOIL's adventures in Africa. After a successful morning with the women of Dunkassa, Sasha, Bobo and I, accompanied by our ADESCA colleagues Zachary and Guninen, embarked on a road trip to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. The purpose of our trip was to visit the African water and sanitation organization EAA / WSA (Eau et Assainisement pour Africa / Water and Sanitation for Africa), formerly known as CREPA. Sasha had first heard of the work of CREPA in 2005 whilst at an EcoSan conference in Durban, South Africa, and SOIL had long benefitted from their research and from their online publications. ...
Back Into the Toilet
This is one story from a multi-part series on SOIL's adventures in Africa. Our wonderful adventures in the depths of abandoned pit latrines continued this week with yet another descent into the old school latrine in Kalale Benin. Our small SOIL team of myself, Baudeler (Bobo) Magloire and Anthony Kilbride, came to Benin one week ago to collaborate with a local organization ADESCA by sharing our ecological sanitation experience in Haiti in an effort to help make women’s community gardens in several rural communities more profitable. For the past several years these women have been working with ADESCA and their international partner SELF to ...
SOIL in Africa Part 2: Into the Toilet
This is one story from a multi-part series on SOIL's adventures in Africa. Today we had one of the highlights of our professional careers, or at least it was one of my finest hours. In an attempt to demonstrate the possibility of converting human waste into compost the SOIL team, together with our hosts ADESCA, paid a visit to the local primary school. But this was not your usual school visit. We were looking for proof that human wastes can be transformed into soil, and what better place to find that proof than deep in the ground in an old latrine. Because the conversion of poop to soil can take at least a year, and we are only here in Benin ...
Experiments in Composting: Po Pistach!
We are REALLY excited up here at the Cap-Haitien office about our new cover material: ground peanut shells! We have been using bagasse (a byproduct of sugarcane production) for years, which has been doing the job, but perhaps not breaking down as fast as we would like. It’s important for us to have a carbon material that works well with feces to break down into compost in a timely manner, as now we are processing so many people’s “waste”. Because sugarcane production is a large portion of the Haitian agronomy sector, it’s been easy for us to obtain as much bagasse as we want. However, we have recently become good friends with Meds for Kids, ...
Spring Newsletter 2012: We have 400,000 gallons of compost!
SOIL has 400,000 gallons of rich, organic compost curing in piles at our waste treatment sites around Haiti and we're producing more at a rate of 5,000 gallons a week! Check out the full story in the SOIL Spring Newsletter.
SAKALA Field trip to Compost Site
Last Sunday 12 young women from Cite Soleil visited the SOIL compost site in Pernier. The young women were from a local organization called SAKALA (supported by Pax Christi Haiti) which works on community development and conflict prevention in Cite Soleil. SOIL has been working with SAKALA for the past 2 years on ecological sanitation and we currently have 20 toilets in the Cite Lumiere neighborhood of Cite Soleil where SAKALA is active. SAKALA has recently started an amazing community garden called Tap Tap Garden with the support of Bochika, a Florida based organization that works closely with SOIL. Given their experience ...
Notre Dame Student Finds That SOIL Compost is Pathogen Free
John Strutner from the University of Notre Dame recently traveled from Indiana to Haiti in order to collect samples of SOIL’s compost and test it for fecal pathogens. SOIL assiduously follows international public health standards for the composting of human waste as it converts over 5,000 gallons of poo per week into nutrient rich fertilizer. Now thanks to John’s study, we have evidence that SOIL’s efforts are paying off. John found that pathogenic material present in the human waste that SOIL freshly collected from ecological sanitation toilets around Haiti was no longer present after going through the composting process. As John ...
Breaking the Cycle of Disease by Closing the Nutrient Cycle: SOIL and the Sanitation Crisis in Port-au-Prince
Dear friends, I am sorry that I have been out of touch for the past several weeks. Every day is like a lifetime and at the end we just collapse into bed after a cold shower, and in the morning we sit up and look out at the camp spread before us and the whirlwind begins again. But most of us have managed to hold on to our sanity, tethering our minds to our work. As the weeks go by the city begins to look more familiar, the shattered buildings have become a part of my mindscape and there are moments when I barely notice them. People wind through the traffic jams and the streets are lined with vendors, people who have left the camps during the ...