David Auerbach is a 2011 Echoing Green Fellow and a co-founder of Sanergy. Sanergy builds healthy, prosperous communities by making hygienic sanitation affordable and accessible throughout Africa’s informal settlements. Follow Sanergy on Facebook and Twitter.
In the lead-up to this summer’s Olympic Games in Rio, a lot of the coverage focused on the abhorrent water quality in Guanabara Bay and the surrounding waterways, which have been receptacles for untreated sewage for years. When the 2016 host city was announced in 2009, officials pledged that they would treat 80 percent of the sewage entering the bay before the games started. Rio fell well short of its goal, causing major health concerns for the athletes competing.
Rio is not alone in struggling to manage its waste; as urban areas across the developing world expand rapidly, they all grapple with how to contain, collect, and treat the waste produced by their growing populations. Waste management is especially difficult in hastily constructed, densely populated urban slums.
Throughout the developing world, 1 billion people–approximately one-third of the urban population–live in slums. As cities grow, so do these informal settlements; slum populations are projected to double in the next 15 years. As demonstrated by Rio, communities around the world are unable to build and scale the infrastructure necessary to serve their growing populations.
In order to ensure the health and prosperity of these cities, developing cities need an integrated waste management solution that does three things: safely capture, treat, and convert more waste into usable end-products; sustain communities’ commitment to waste management; and develop waste-derived end-products that meet an existing need.
In Nairobi, Kenya, Sanergy is pioneering a new waste management model to serve these growing areas. We catalyze participation at every step of the process by providing customer-centric waste-management products and services in which residents can invest and by converting the waste we collect into valuable agricultural inputs that help drive a sustainable agriculture sector.
Capture and convert more waste
Currently, only 12 percent of Nairobi’s slums are serviced by sewers, and these pipes are often broken or clogged, spilling waste into the environment. A successful waste management solution should safely capture a larger portion of the waste produced by a community and efficiently deliver it for conversion.
To solve for this, we have built a franchise network of over 750 sanitation units, known as Fresh Life Toilets, in Nairobi’s slums. The Fresh Life Toilet and the services that accompany it are designed to meet the needs and desires of our potential customers–both the franchisees who purchase the toilets and the residents who use them. The toilet itself can be installed within a day, and it has a variety of requested amenities, including a tile floor, a coat hook and mirror, and an ergonomically designed squat plate.
Another consequence of rapid urbanization throughout the developing world is an increased reliance on a smaller agricultural sector; to help Kenya’s farmers maximize their yield in order to feed Kenya’s growing urban populations, Sanergy converts all the waste we collect into high-value agricultural inputs. In 2016 alone, we have already sold over 200 tons of organic fertilizer to small- and medium-sized farms throughout Kenya. Sanergy’s products increase crop yields by at least 30 percent and also improve soil health in the long term, allowing the land to be productive for longer periods of time and improve harvest time.
By turning what we collect into high-quality agricultural inputs, we are creating a sustainable model in which people recognize the benefits to be derived from ensuring waste is properly contained, collected, and treated–and in which they are eager to participate.
Sustain communities’ commitment to waste management
Fresh Life usage is an “addictive” behavior; about 85 percent of first-time users become repeat customers. A sophisticated infrastructure network is useless if people are unwilling to adopt the product. The challenge, thus, lies in encouraging that first use and in getting prospective customers to try a Fresh Life Toilet for the first time.
Many non-users are unsure about what these Fresh Life structures are, so we invite non-users to use a Fresh Life Toilet for free, and we have started featuring the inside of the toilet in our ad campaigns–literally turning the toilet inside out.
For our franchisees running their Fresh Life Toilets, we provide support services to help them offer the best sanitation solution possible, including access to financing, bookkeeping and customer service training, and reliable waste collection by properly trained and equipped teammates. Through this commitment, we have grown our Fresh Life network to serve over 37,000 people every day, and we add more toilets every week.
In addition, we are appealing to new segments of the population by piloting other solutions to meet the needs of customers. A new product we are currently trialing is an in-home toilet model–a more private, dignified, and convenient sanitation solution than is often available to residents in these areas.
By offering waste management products and services people want to use, we can ensure that a portion of the waste produced in these communities is properly contained, and we know that we can safely remove, treat, and process it for reuse.
A sustainable urban waste management solution
As populations boom in coming years, the amount of waste produced will continue to grow at an exponential rate; the time to optimize the systems and infrastructure to contain, collect, treat, and convert this waste is now. By developing products to meet customers’ needs throughout the waste-management process, Sanergy offers a solution that encourages people to invest in cleaning up their own communities, strengthening the resilience of their cities, and ensuring the security of their food systems.
This article is part of a series that showcases emerging leaders’ voices on a variety of issues related to social change. The opinions expressed in this article belong to the author(s). Echoing Green provides these leaders with financial and strategic support and leadership development. Learn more at echoinggreen.org.