44 results for tag: research

Is There Demand for a Better Toilet?

Photo: Vic Hinterlang We know the global sanitation system is broken. Around the world nearly 2.5 billion people lack access to a toilet of any kind and even more than that lack access to a toilet that ensures safe waste treatment. Over the past 4 years SOIL has made in-home toilets accessible to households in Haiti through our EkoLakay toilet service. What we didn’t know, and have been trying to discover, was how much people are willing to pay for a household toilet. As SOIL set out to see if we could answer that question and explore new markets for EkoLakay in Port-au-Prince, we discovered some unexpected trends in sanitation satisfaction and ...

New Research Shows SOIL’s Compost Often More Effective Than Chemical Fertilizer

Photo credit: Tony Marcelli Last June, we introduced our readers to Estrella Ardanza and Susana Perez Bejar, two Cranfield University students who have been busy studying the impact of SOIL’s Konpòs Lakay compost on native Haitian plants for their Master's theses. After months of hard work and thoughtful collaboration, we’re excited to share that the numbers have been crunched and the theses have been written. SOIL is dedicated to developing innovative and research-based ecological sanitation solutions here in Haiti and for years we’ve partnered with farmers and research institutions to study the impact of our compost on local core crops. ...

200 Pounds of Compost, Over 7,000 Kilometers and 1 Partnership

In a neat new research collaboration with implications on how we use and market compost in Haiti, SOIL is working with researchers at Cranfield University in the UK to evaluate the agricultural impact of SOIL's compost (Konpòs Lakay). This work can be summarized in numbers: 2 students will research the potential of Konpòs Lakay as part of their Master’s theses in the university’s greenhouse and laboratories. A third student will research a different kind of organic fertilizer to serve as a comparison. For this purpose, 200 pounds of SOIL's Konpòs Lakay were shipped from Port-au-Prince to Cranfield along with a few hundred Moringa ...

Scaling Up a Household Toilet Service – One Neighborhood at a Time

(Photo credit: Monica Wise) Over 2.5 billion people globally currently lack access to sanitation. As a heartbreaking result, over 2,200 children under the age of five die every day from preventable diarrheal diseases. Despite billions of dollars spent on sanitation interventions, the global population continues to suffer from the lack of access to safe sanitation. Part of the problem is that traditional sewer systems require considerable up-front capital investment, and depend on the availability of reliable water and energy supplies. In contrast, SOIL’s believes that by using extremely low-cost environmental technologies paired with simple ...

An Optimal Flush

Faithful readers of the SOIL blog will know that we spend a lot of time thinking about cover material at SOIL. Cover material is basically the “flush” that keeps the toilet from getting gross as covering the waste with some kind of dry material prevents it from smelling and deters flies from visiting. Here at SOIL, we call it bonzodè (pronounced bon-zo-deh, literally “good smell” in Haitian Creole), and it’s a crucial piece of the SOIL business model. With thousands of customers each using a handful every time they poo in a SOIL toilet, we need a whole lot of it – and our demand will only increase as SOIL expands its services. J...

Sludge Love at 4th International Faecal Sludge Management Conference

A few weeks ago, SOIL Directors Sasha Kramer and Nick Preneta traveled to Chennai, India to represent SOIL at the 4th International Faecal Sludge Management Conference (FSM4). Sasha gave a presentation about SOIL's EkoLakay program, and we also shared two posters about Konpòs Lakay and our ongoing cost analysis research. @SOILHaiti sasha kramer speaking wisdom at #FSM4 https://t.co/eFFGTNbJkN — eve mackinnon (@eve_mackinnon) February 20, 2017 [gview file="https://www.oursoil.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SOIL-Composting_Poster-v4.pdf"]  [gview file="https://www.oursoil.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/FSM4_ProcessCostAnalysis_Poster_v4.pd...

Breaking Down All the Costs

As SOIL works to expand and continually improve our household toilet service, EkoLakay, we are constantly evaluating and reassessing our costs. To do this successfully, we need to have a detailed breakdown of what our costs are –how much we’re spending, what we’re spending money on, and what each facet of our program costs. Last year I started researching and analyzing EkoLakay service costs at the household level, meaning breaking down our cost analysis further to examine how much each piece of the program costs per household. We believed that by breaking down the costs this way we could better examine what fraction of our costs we were ...

Sunscreen or Rubber Boots? SOIL Has a Weather Station!

Last month we started collecting meteorological data at our composting site in northern Haiti. Currently, very few weather records are available in Haiti, and only a handful of stations publicly share the data they collect. With help from Becca Ryals and Gavin McNicol, our research partners from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, we built a brand new weather station at our northern compost site that offers a new, publicly-available source of continuous, local weather information! In fact, we set up the weather station just days after a tropical storm dumped massive amounts of rain on northern Haiti, flooding many people out of their homes, ...

SOIL Haiti at World Water Week 2016

Thanks to support from the Inter American Development Bank, SOIL's Executive Director, Dr. Sasha Kramer, presented findings from SOIL's EkoLakay social business at World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden in August. World Water Week is an annual event that convenes practitioners, experts, and innovators to share ideas, network, and develop new solutions. SOIL's work was featured as part of a panel discussion on water and sanitation as a business. You can watch Sasha's full talk on the livestream of the panel below. World Water Week: Eye on Latin America and the Caribbean: Water and Sanitation as a Business: Constraints-Opportunities, Tuesday, August ...

SOIL (Re)presents at Conference in Kumasi

Last week I had the great honor and pleasure of participating in and presenting at the Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC) International Conference, hosted on the Kwame Nkrumah University Science and Technology campus in Kumasi, Ghana. The theme of this year’s conference was Ensuring Availability and Sustainable Management of Water and Sanitation for All. The conference featured many presentations covering topics like fecal sludge management, resource recovery, and sanitation marketing, and was an incredibly valuable opportunity to gain exposure to international research and best practices in SOIL’s sector of work. In addition, ...