Toilet Design Update – EkoMobil!
Construction has been booming in northern Haiti along the corridor between Cap-Haitien and Ouanaminthe where the SOIL Cap-Haitien office and waste treatment site are located. The construction sites are managed by a combination of domestic and foreign companies and non-governmental organizations, and they are providing jobs to hundreds of Haitians.
All of these people have to poop somewhere! SOIL is perfectly positioned, both geographically and strategically, to meet the demand for the short-term sanitation access required at these construction sites. SOIL’s EkoMobil rental sanitation service is ecological, economical, and experienced in providing sanitation to a variety of clients. In the past the toilets have been used by large crowds during festivals, by students at schools, and by daily workers at construction sites.
One of the best challenges for a young start-up like EkoMobil is to have too much demand, and we are excited to be in a position where we have almost rented out of our entire stock of converted porta-potty style toilet structures! In anticipation of further demand and growth of the EkoMobil social business, our technical team started innovating and set out to build a cost-effective, durable structure with local materials that will house our toilets. We have completed construction on our first model and now we will enter into an iterative design phase during which we’ll test the design, ask for feedback, troubleshoot, and modify the design as needed.
We are not only innovating our EkoMobil superstructure, but are also simplifying the management and use of our toilets by designing a toilet box that houses a 15-gallon drum to collect both urine and fecal wastes, and has a set of rollers at the bottom of the toilet box for easy placement and removal of the drums.
At SOIL we are always striving to improve our toilet models and sanitation services, and we can say we have definitely been keeping our technical team hard at work with these construction projects. Stay tuned in the future to hear how the growth of this service progresses!
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