We are providing a clean and hygienic public toilet that produces energy, which we turn into products including mobile phone charges and hot water.

One customer is Mahandry; she lives just two minutes away from Loowatt’s Energy Unit in the FAAMI neighbourhood. Mahandry is one of the few local residents who has a serviceable toilet at home, but she has no hot water.

Since Loowatt introduced the sale of hot water a few months ago, Mahandry has become a regular. Every day she buys a bucket of hot water for bathing, which she couldn’t afford before, as heating water with charcoal is expensive. The Loowatt system uses biogas generated from the toilet system, which is renewable, safe and affordable.

Mahandry told the local Loowatt team that she really enjoys the experience, and that since she is 8 months pregnant, it is comforting to use hot rather than cold water.

She currently takes the water home to bathe, but she is excited about the prospect of the next addition to the Energy Unit: on-site showering facilities, which she thinks will be convenient and complimentary to the toilet facility.

Chris Holden

 

Rio de Janeiro hosts the biggest carnival in the world, which is also one of the biggest cultural manifestations around the globe. This year the streets of Rio were dominated by 500 blocos (block parties), and hosted the famous Samobodrome parade, which in total attract around 9 million people to the city.

Crowding leads to littering and civilians peeing in public places. This year 16,200 chemical toilets were installed around the city and inspectors patrolled the streets detaining around 800 carnival goers caught urinating in public.

With the aim to raise awareness to this problem AfroReggae, an NGO that supports social change through arts, launched ‘Xixi Eletrico’ (electric pee), a music trio car powered by urine.

Around 50,000 people followed the float, which paraded the famous Ipanema beach, where urine collection pods (like the one above) were installed.

The project, designed by JWT Brazil, works like a mini-Hydroelectric power plant. Apparently, the urine’s flow is channeled to rotate a dynamo, which generates energy. It is then stored in a battery that is connected to AfroReggae’s electric trio once it is charged.

This is one great waste-to-energy awareness project and there’s certainly real need and scope for larger scale solutions; About to host both the next World Cup (2014) and the Olympic games (2016), Rio must invest in its public sanitation, which this year was the best so far in numbers but maintenance was poor.

Perhaps AfroReggae’s trio will instigate the cities’ interest to explore creative and efficient ways of managing human and municipal waste, if not harvesting energy?

Fernanda Costa

Yesterday we attended the Rushlight Show, an annual gathering where around 30 cleantech business demonstrated their innovative products and services.

Amongst the exhibitors there were great examples of exciting technologies such as RE Hydrogen compressor systems and Muckbuster containerized digesters; we also met specialists in low carbon economies, legal and business advice providers and learned about Knowledge Transfer at the Environmental Sustainability KTN stall.

The event was held at the Royal College of Surgeons, which boasts a fascinating array of anatomical specimens in the adjacent Hunterian Museum, where pre-dinner drinks were served. The museum is definitely worth a visit!

At the gala dinner, we were delighted to win The Rushlight Organic Resource Award and The Rushlight Resource Innovation Award. Winners receive a high-value package of custom consulting from top UK practitioners in various disciplines that help grow clean technology enterprises. We were lucky to share our table with long-term practitioners in the space of waste treatment and sludge management.

All in all a great day for Loowatt!

Dear Loowatt Friends,

The festive season is upon us. Our pilot system in Antananarivo is now generating energy and serving customers who pay for toilet visits, mobile phone charges and hot water.

We are grateful to all of you for what has been a productive and exciting year, and we wish everyone the best for 2013. There were plenty of memorable days in 2012. We thought it would be nice to share some of our most exciting moments. So here are the highlights, and be sure to also check out our slideshow here!

Designing the Pilot System

To plan our pilot system in Antananarivo, Madagascar, we began with a local study of user preferences, household expenses, and the value potential in clean toilets, clean energy, and fertiliser. The resulting system design links toilets to energy in a package called the Energy Unit.

The pilot was funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through the Grand Challenges Explorations Initiative. Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) also gave generous support through a grant from the USAID African Cities for the Future fund.

Building Toilets

We refined our toilet’s patented sealing unit, now built from single moulded parts. In Antananarivo, we worked with local experts to construct the toilet and anaerobic digester.

Our toilet travelled to the Reinvent the Toilet Fair, a wonderful event hosted at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We also exhibited at the UK’s Ecobuild, the Innovate! show, and New Loos for London.

We presented a paper at the Faecal Sludge Management 2 conference that detailed our system design and data from the Madagascar Pilot.

Research

In Antananarivo, we developed a vermicomposting process to convert digestate into fertiliser. With help from Dr. Claire Furlong, a talented sanitation and vermiculture expert, we put locally sourced composting worms to work. A surprise outcome of Claire’s work was the discovery in our mix of an undocumented worm species that we had DNA tested at North-West University in South Africa. We are now working to have the species, which is in the Acanthodrilidae family, described.

Back in London, we’re using lab digesters to simulate our larger systems, breaking down the same Loowatt feedstock at Imperial College’s Civil and Environmental Science Lab.

Getting the Word Out

We were delighted to win Social Business of the Year at the London Social Business Conference. This year in the UK, Loowatt appeared in a number of publications including the Financial Times and the Observer.

Part One of A New Business in Antananarivo, a compelling video produced by Visual World in Madagascar that showcases the Loowatt pilot system and its neighbourhood, was published on our newly launched website, and Part Two, showcasing the Antananarivo pilot in action, will be finished soon.

Serving Customers

In the Madagascar spring, our Antananarivo system began to operate and serve customers.

The Energy Unit is open to the public, operated by Felix Ramaherilala, a local entrepreneur. The toilet serves a steadily increasing number of daily customers, who also come to buy energy products, including hot water and mobile phone charges. The Compost Factory has begun to produce fertiliser that looks friable and marketable. Data collection is underway on every aspect of the system.

To all who have helped us along this fascinating journey,
THANK YOU! The Loowatt team wishes you happy holidays!

During the workshop ‘New Loos for London?’ in which Loowatt participated, designers, entrepreneurs, researchers and waste management specialists got together to discuss alternative technologies for urban sanitation.

Instigated by creative games proposed by the organizers, the participants split in teams, developed what if scenarios, that used vacuum and composting toilets, treated human waste in decentralised anaerobic digestion plants, and used vermicomposting to turn waste into fertiliser.

Each team had to make an animation depicting the scenarios, using Play-Do and Lego. The rather funny ‘rough and ready’ videos can be found on the links below:

Silvia Makes a Poo: a tale of integration between sanitation, anaerobic digestion and farming;

McWorm: depicting how worms can make compost and burgers;

and

Status Quo: portraying the obstacles involving changes from the current sanitation system.

We exhibited a prototype of our waterless toilet alongside Envirolet (composting and vacuum systems), WooWoo (composting toilets) and Tiger toilet (vermicomposting toilets). It was a great opportunity for us to exchange ideas with our peers, with whom we share a motivation to implement innovative, water-saving sanitation systems. We also discussed the taboos around proposing a new system and debated about the social implications of switching to a new technology in a city where water-flush toilets have been the norm for over a century.

The workshop was organized by UCL lecturers Dr. Tse Hui Teh, Dr Barbara Penner and Danielle Wilkens, took place on the 8^th and 9^th November and was supported by UCL Grand Challenges Small Grant for Sustainable Cities.

­–Fernanda Costa

On World Toilet Day 2012, our Antananarivo toilet is ready to open to the public. It’s a soft opening; we’ll gradually modify the number of users and operational regimen as we collect data over the coming months on toilet use, energy generation, and sale of energy products. The local community has been extremely supportive of our project. We’re employing local residents to run both the energy unit and compost site. We’re using human waste to produce biogas that charge mobile phones, radios, batteries, et cetera. Locals can also buy hot water from Loowatt for showering. The toilet and new sources of energy will have an immediate positive impact on the local environment and quality of life.

Click here to download.

Click here to download.
More to come soon of the system, which is now on the ground.

After an invigorating round of two dozen 45-second pitches, we were delighted to be in the company of two inspiring finalists:
Sunny Money, an offshot of SolarAid that aims to eradicate kerosene lanterns from Africa, replacing them with a broad range of solar lights, and ValueForm, which could make supermarket shelves more sustainable with straw-based fruit and vegetable cartons that will actually be more affordable than petro-plastics.
The three finalists had the chance to present our businesses in a bit more detail, and field thoughtful questions from the competition judges and the audience. We were happy to encounter widespread interest in Loowatt’s mission.

On 25th, 26th and 28th of September Loowatt will be showcasing a toilet prototype at the ‘Innovate!’ exhibition, which celebrates the latest business innovations to emerge from the InnovationRCA, The Royal College of Art’s Incubator.The exhibition is a great opportunity to see the work of new businesses that, like Loowatt, emerged from physical design ideas, to address important issues. It showcases what InnovationRCA, an initiative that has been selecting and nurturing graduate enterprise potential since 1999, has to offer.

From addressing survival necessities like sanitation and flood relief to roasting your own green coffee beans at home, there is something here for everyone. The 15 exhibits are organized in 5 categories: Future Technologies, Health and Wellbeing, Everyday Living, Design for Industry and Design for Social Need.

Innovate! is being held at the brand-new Dyson building gallery space, in Battersea, London. For the full address, please visit InnovationRCA.