Service model for toilets, waste collection and solar treatment

Sanivation has recently developed a model that focuses on treating beneficiaries as customers. We will rent aspirational toilets, service them twice a week, and treat the human feces with our cost effective solar concentrators. The idea is this service is one people aspire to have. Customers are excited to show their family who is visiting for the week their clean, smell-free and user friendly toilet.

Sanivation can provide this service at the same rate many people are paying to use the poorly maintained community toilets, 5 cents per use. Also most of the human feces coming from these community toilets goes untreated and ends up spreading diseases to the same customers that paid to use the toilet. At Sanivation, we believe that if customers are paying to use a toilet, this should also insure that human feces are being properly treated and then reused or disposed. In fact many toilets implemented only do human feces containment, providing a limited service. Right now only 10% of fecal sludge is being treated (WHO, 2008) and we think this number is too low, when 1,600 childrens’ lives a day could be saved from proper treatment of human feces.

In order to accomplish this goal of providing an improved service model as proposed by WASHcost, Sanivation has designed a cost-effective way to treat human feces with the free and abundant energy from the sun. We have tested our solar concentrator design and have shown that it inactivates at least 99% of the most robust pathogens. See our experimental setup in our blog post “So did this solar concentrator thing really kill helminth?”.

Solar concentrator with 50L container of feces

WashCost, July 2011. Assessing Sanitation Service Levels. IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre.

Below is an infographic, highlighting the service cycle of Sanivation’s toilet provision, waste collection, treatment and reuse. All the pictures are photographs the Sanivation team has taken from selling and implementing our services with the largest NGO in Chile, Un Techo Para Chile.