31 results for tag: toilets
SOIL Celebrates May Day at the Annual Limbé Festival
May Day, or Agriculture and Labor Day here in Haiti, is celebrated as a national public holiday. One may wonder about the state of agricultural production here in Haiti after many decades of deforestation and environmental degradation. What is there to celebrate when Haiti is losing over 30 million metric tons of top soil every year and has to import the majority of its food? Haiti used to be known as the “Pearl of the Antilles,” producing so much that it exported the majority of its food. At SOIL, we believe that it’s important to celebrate all the work that local communities are doing to improve agriculture systems and support the dream ...
ONE: 7 Sustainable toilets that could change the way the world poops
"We know how important toilets are in the fight against water contamination and diarrheal disease. But because of infrastructure and cost, conventional toilets don’t always work in developing countries – and as a result, 35% of the world’s population to lack access to basic, working toilets. Fortunately, there are a few cost-effective, eco-friendly, sustainable toilet solutions out there that work for all kinds of environments. It’s creative thinking like this that can help increase the number of people who have access to toilets – and perhaps even change the way the world poops." --Jaswanth Madhavan, ONE, November 18, ...
New SOIL EcoSan Toilet Models Being Tested
The world of composting toilets is full of different models and technologies. At SOIL we strive to design toilet models that are desirable to the users and affordably constructed entirely from locally-available materials. Almost all SOIL toilets use urine diversion (also known as UD) funnels which separate the pee and poo through a specially designed toilet seat (see photos below, and related links following this post). Urine diversion technologies benefit both the toilet users (by preventing smells and flies) and SOIL (by reducing the weight of the toilet buckets that need to be removed from communities for safe treatment at one of SOIL's decentral...
Haiti Business Week: SOIL Develops Economic Model for Sustainable Sanitation in Haiti"
February 28, 2013 By Marina Vatav for Haiti Business Week As Haiti tries to improve its people's quality of life and boost tourism, there is one important issue that remains to be solved: poor sanitation infrastructure. Lack of toilets and a poor sanitation system facilitate the spread of diseases, intimidate foreign visitors, and affect the quality of life of many Haitian people. According to Unicef (2010 report) only 10% of rural Haitians and less than 25% of those in cities have access to adequate sanitation facilities, by far the lowest coverage in the Western Hemisphere. Building a modern sewer system would cost billions of dollars; however, ...
Theo Talks Episode 9: Loading Bunnies and Bobcats
Lots of adventures in EcoSan this week with your favorite SOIL Regional Director Theo Huitema. Theo was on the move, traveling from Cap-Haitien to Port-au-Prince so that he could pick up a newly acquired Bobcat skid-steer loader for the SOIL Farm in Limonade. The first video is a hilarious chronicle of the team's efforts to load the Bobcat (or, as Theo calls it "the Bobbycat") into the back of the Cap-Haitien baskil (truck). In the spirit of fair trades, Theo brought a wonderful surprise for the SOIL Port-au-Prince office in exchange for the Bobcat: another rabbit! In classic SOIL fashion, Theo loaded the bunny into a household toilet for the long ...
SOIL EcoSan Toilets Provide Sanitation Services for Haiti's National Carnival
This year Cap-Haitien was chosen to host Haiti’s National Carnival and we’re all still recovering from a beautiful week of dancing and music. The city saw an influx of over one million people: hotels were fully booked months ago, new ones were being built overnight, friends were pulling out extra bedding and sleep mats, and tents were popping up all over the city. But even in the midst of Haiti’s biggest party, SOIL was focusing on sanitation! Through collaboration with the city and the Haitian government ministry for sanitation (Direction Nationale de l'Eau Potable et de l'Assainissement or DINEPA), SOIL built 10 mobile ecological sanitation ...
EcoSan Training at SOIL's Composting Site in Trutier
At SOIL, we value education and information sharing because one of our ultimate goals is to assist in spreading EcoSan technology throughout Haiti. We dream of seeing a toilet in every home, and EcoSan for all. Yesterday at our site in Trutier, we were happy to share some of our experiences in EcoSan with a group of 22 people living in Croix-des-Bouquets (just north of Port-au-Prince). The group, made up primarily of farmers, came out for the training session to learn about the differences between SOIL's centralized composting methods, based on a drum based waste collection system, and more permanent double vault toilets. Each of the 22 participa...
An update from our partners at Re.Source
As many of you know, the Household Toilet Project is now in full swing, with 150 families in Shada, Cap-Haitien, using their beautiful household toilets on a daily basis. SOIL's partner organization Re.Source is in the process of checking back in with everyone in Shada to gather information about how people are feeling about the toilets. Here's an excerpt from their latest blog post: "The work doesn’t end when you install the toilets. That’s when it begins. Since deploying our toilets in November, we’ve been working closely with our friends at SOIL to refine the collection service, to make it faster, more convenient, and more enjoyable for our ...
Women in the World: "Saving Lives with Smart Toilets in Haiti"
Published January 9, 2013 for the Women in the World Foundation. By Sam Ritholtz The third anniversary of the cataclysmic Haiti earthquake—a monster that registered 7.0 on the Richter scale, killed 300,000 people and displaced more than 1 million—is coming up on January 12 and with it will come a fresh slew of media stories about the miserable state of Haiti today and its failed reconstruction efforts. That makes Sasha Kramer mad. "People around the world will be throwing up their hands and saying, ‘Haiti again! Will they ever get their lives together!’' says Dr. Kramer (pictured above), an ecologist and head of a Port-au-Prince-based ...
Recognizing a Community Health Hero
Today the SOIL team was thrilled to present Marie Mineuve Felissant, one of our public toilet managers, with an award for excellent work and exceptional commitment to SOIL's mission of providing safe and dignified sanitation to people throughout Haiti. Ms. Felissant manages one of the SOIL toilet blocks in the Kan de Viktim IDP camp in Port-au-Prince. Originally from Jeremie, Ms. Felissant's extended family remains in the southern city, while she and one of her young daughters reside in the capitol. Prior to the 2010 earthquake, Ms. Felissant was working as a housekeeper, for a woman in Port-au-Prince. However, her home was destroyed in the earthqua...