22 results for tag: waste treatment

A conversation with SOIL’s Waste Treatment Manager, Sadouddly Michael Lambert

Our Haitian staff members remain safe in Cap-Haitien as we continue to navigate the current challenges with a robust emergency response plan and an incredibly dedicated group of employees.  In one of our final staff conversations of the year, we spoke with Saddoudly Michael Lambert, SOIL’s Waste Treatment Manager, about his work, life and the current times in Haiti.   Interviewer: How are you and your family doing right now?  Sadouddly: My family and I are doing well although the situation is making things more difficult for us as it affects my family business and their daily activities. Interviewer: What does a typical work day look ...

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 ...

Meet Sadouddly

The SOIL team is pleased to announce the arrival of a new Waste Treatment Manager at our composting facility in Mouchinette. Sadouddly Michael Lambert is stepping into this position in the place of our long-time manager, Job Etienne, who is retiring from SOIL. Sadouddly joined SOIL a little over a month ago, and we recently had the opportunity to sit down and learn more about him and his responsibilities.   Tell us a little about yourself: I was born in Ouanaminthe, and I grew up in Cap-Haitien. I moved to the Dominican Republic to study electromechanical engineering at Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra.   How did you hear about ...

SOIL Receives Stamp of Approval from Haitian Ministry of Environment

BNEE staff visiting Konpòs Lakay customer’s coffee plantation When SOIL first started out building our composting waste treatment facility in the northern Haitian community of Mouchinette  in 2012, the only thing on the property was a big mango tree. Since then, the SOIL team has completely transformed the site into a beautiful, efficient, and highly productive composting facility. Now, alongside that original welcoming mango tree, Mouchinette is a flurry of activity, with SOIL team members working hard to empty containers, turn and nurture the compost, and maintain the growing facility.   In 2019, we expanded the composting site to accommodate ...

Human Waste for Sustainable Futures

Photo Courtesy of Melissa Schilling Transformation has always been one of our core values – transformation of wastes into resources, of disempowered people into community advocates, of exploited landscapes into lush, productive gardens. We are a population of over seven billion people, living in a world with increasingly scarce resources. Yet, we at SOIL know that there is one resource – often overlooked – that is perpetually available: human waste. For us, human waste isn’t waste at all; it’s sustainability, it’s nutrients, its ecological power. We’ve been demonstrating the immense potential of human waste since 2006 and we don’t ...

From Larvae to Chicken Feed: What’s New with Black Soldier Fly Research

In 2019, the SOIL Research Team began testing out the possibility of using black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) as a new, additional method of transforming waste from our EkoLakay sanitation service into another valuable resource. Led by SOIL Waste-to-Resource Consultant, Michèle Heeb, SOIL experimented with BSFL at our composting site in Northern Haiti and found that our EkoLakay waste was indeed suitable for this exciting technology. The Research Team even managed to breed the flies in captivity, a prerequisite for the technology to work on a large scale. These promising results made us hopeful that this innovative waste-to-resource technology could ...

Better, Cheaper, Faster: Researching Ways to Improve SOIL’s Composting Process

Over the last six months, SOIL has made exciting and significant progress in expanding access to dignified and reliable sanitation for vulnerable communities in Haiti.  In order to continue on this upward trend, we at SOIL are working hard to produce innovative approaches to support our growth strategy to accommodate more households on the service and the additional increase in waste to treat.   To help with our strategy, we are once again partnering with Human Centered Design experts, Lukas Baumgartner and Jojo Linder, consultants from Kreativ Konsum and Kompotoi. The creative design duo, has worked with us on a number of projects to improve ...

Yale Climate Connections: As the planet warms, can we afford to treat poop as waste?

photo credit: Yale Climate Connections For centuries, people have been using human waste as a precious commodity for soil fertilization around the world. In fact, night soil, the term given to the human waste product, has had entire economies built around it as a means for sustainable agriculture production from Asia to the Amazon. A recent article in Yale Climate Connections provided some insight into understanding why we have wandered so far from these roots, how that has impacted climate change, and if it is time once again to rethink human waste as a valuable commodity. Prior to World War II, livestock manure management was an integral part of ...

SOCIETY Magazine: Completing the Poop Loop

“There is no such thing as waste; every molecule, every organism is valuable, even excrement.” – Sasha Kramer As part of a reporting program devoted supporting innovative development journalists, Grégoire Belhoste and William Thorp spent time with SOIL at our Port-au-Prince facility last year to better understand the history and process of SOIL’s regenerative urban sanitation service. The beautiful feature piece in Society Magazine explores SOIL’s history, the “poop loop” cycle, and why we believe that sanitation is a human right. Baudelaire Magloire told Society Magazine that, “we all deserve sanitation. Sanitation ...

Green America: Tackling Soil, Sanitation, and Beyond in Haiti

For a recently published feature about SOIL’s lifesaving sanitation service, Kevin Fitzpatrick of Green America interviewed SOIL Executive Director and Co-Founder Dr. Sasha Kramer about what led her to co-found SOIL, the connection between sanitation and agriculture, and the innovation behind SOIL’s revolutionary composting waste treatment facility. SOIL’s solution “addresses a wide range of basic human rights issues such as access to food, access to sanitation, and living in a clean environment.” And, as Dr. Kramer shared with Kevin, “sanitation and food are inextricably connected, both in the sense that you wouldn't poop if you ...