88 results for tag: ecological sanitation

SOIL’S EkoMobil Toilets Provide Sanitation Services at Boulva Naval

Photo Credit: Sakapfet OKAP On February 5th, 12th and 18th the second annual Boulva Naval festivities took place on the boulevard du Cap-Haïtien with the theme: A City, A Youth, A Culture and created an atmosphere of celebration in the city. The event included parades of dancers, acrobats, walking bands and a float carrying a DJ. As Haiti continues battling crisis after crisis — including ongoing insecurity in Port-au-Prince — and the national Kanaval being canceled again this year, residents of cities across Haiti kicked off local carnivals over the past month, eager for a chance to escape from the hardships and stresses they face daily. ...

SOIL Grows Through It All

A time-lapse map illustrates SOIL's household service growth from 2014 - 2022 Since its founding in 2007, SOIL has been working to provide regenerative and life-saving sanitation services to meet the vastly unmet need for improved sanitation in Haiti, particularly in urban and peri-urban areas. SOIL’s flagship household service, EkoLakay, was first piloted in Cap-Haitien in 2014, and since this time, has expanded to reach over 2,200 households, providing more than 13,000 people in urban Haiti with safely managed sanitation. Each and every household that joins our service is a milestone for us; and represents one more family that no longer has to ...

SOIL Talks Trash (Magic)

Daniel Tillias & Dr. Sasha Kramer with SOIL's compost SOIL’s Executive Director Dr. Sasha Kramer and SOIL Board Co-Chair Daniel Tillias were recently featured on the Trash Magic podcast where they discussed ecological sanitation, recycling human waste into nutrient-rich compost, and empowering local economies in urban Haiti. The podcast, hosted by chemical engineer Oakley Jennings-Fast and waste and recycling expert Sara Fuentes, aims to demystify the circular economy and encourage listeners to ‘change the world one purchase and one piece of trash at a time.’  On the podcast Sasha and Daniel discuss ways that sanitation remains the most ...

Climate Mitigation: SOIL’s continuing partnership with Global Water Intelligence

Each year Global Water Intelligence (GWI) organizes the American Water Summit bringing together policy makers, regulatory and investment communities, and leaders working within the North American water sector to explore technologies, challenge mindsets, and tackle key questions that are vital to channeling action in the water industry. SOIL is thrilled to be partnering once again with GWI to offset the carbon emissions for participants’ travel to the conference.  Our groundbreaking carbon-offset partnership with GWI began last year at the 2022 Global Water Summit after GWI recognized the evidence-based carbon mitigation impact of SOIL’s ...

Making the Invisible Visible with CBSA’s Rémi Kaupp

Rémi Kaupp, Executive Director of the Container Based Sanitation Alliance    Imagine not having a toilet. It’s a situation that we’ve asked you, our readers and supporters, to think about from time to time, and this week, with World Toilet Day just around the corner, we are asking you to take a closer look at what living without a toilet means for people around the world. And to help us think more deeply about some of the specifics and possible solutions, we spoke with Rémi Kaupp, Friend of SOIL and the Executive Director of the Container Based Sanitation Alliance (CBSA) about perceptions of poop, the role that the public sector ...

Update from Haiti: October 2022

For the past several weeks, Haiti has been experiencing a new period of “peyi lòk,” or “country lockdown.” Thousands of Haitians have taken to the streets to protest the political, economic and social instability, and soaring fuel prices. Roadblocks and unrest, combined with ongoing insecurity and armed gangs blocking key transport pathways, have led to severe fuel shortages and a near total communications blackout in many parts of the country.  These challenges have forced many critical institutions in Haiti to suspend operations in recent days including hospitals and at least one major distributor of potable water, due to lack of fuel ...

Expanding SOIL’s Data Concepts and Analyses Using DataCamp

SOIL's Research & Operations teams collaborating  SOIL’s research team is always looking for ways to improve our EkoLakay processes so that we can continue to provide our customers with the highest quality sanitation service. To do so, the team regularly undertakes projects and analyses that inform strategic and operational improvements to our services. An important way for the researchers to identify and understand the specific changes that need to be made is by generating solid, data-driven evidence for analysis and study. DataCamp, an online, interactive learning platform that teaches users data science and skills, has partnered with ...

Back to the Basics: An Overview of SOIL’s Essential Service

Readers of our blog might know that SOIL provides EkoLakay sanitation services to households in the city of Cap-Haïtien on Haiti’s northern coast and that we are currently providing this essential service to nearly 2,000 households, impacting over 11,000 individuals. This past year alone, our sanitation and composting staff collected and treated over 500 metric tons of waste from the communities we serve and produced 170 metric tons of compost through our ecological waste treatment process. But do you know how the service works?  For new potential household customers, the EkoLakay journey begins when an individual expresses interest in ...

Breeding in Progress: Updates on SOIL’s BSFL Research

SOIL's black soldier fly rearing unit containers, provided in partnership with USAID.  In 2019, the SOIL Research Team began testing out the possibility of using black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) as a method of transforming waste from our EkoLakay sanitation service into protein-rich larvae that can serve as animal feed. This technology can be used in combination with the existing composting process. After a delay in our pilot trials due to the Covid-19 pandemic, work resumed last year on the project, in partnership with USAID Haiti, and we have a few exciting updates to share.  Black soldier flies (BSF) are endemic to Haiti and wild ones have ...

Following the Science with Carbon Credits: SOIL at the Global Water Summit

SOIL’s Executive Director, Dr. Sasha Kramer, attended the Global Water Summit Water-Positive Zero Carbon conference in Madrid in May, delivering a keynote address in the Opening Plenary session and joining a panel discussion on “Monetising Carbon for SDG6”. The Global Water Summit brings together industry experts from the public and private sector with the goal to map out a better future for water through global political commitment and climate action to create transformational change for our valuable water resources. The conference offered interesting insight and discussions around the opportunities and challenges of current carbon market with ...