ITGH: Smart Ecosystems

1. Faecal waste contamination of water systems as a result of landfill overflow or improper waste management poses a major threat to health, exposing vulnerable populations to a high burden of diarrhoeal disease (a leading cause of childhood mortality and morbidity worldwide). These issues strongly affect communities in informal settlements who are dependent on often-inadequate public sanitation. 

2. Our solution converts faecal waste to biochar, eliminating pathogen reservoirs created by traditional waste disposal and creating a valuable product. To monitor our success in eliminating pathogens, we will synthesize data from sensors in public toilet blocks and water sources with environmental monitoring to build a comprehensive and continuous epidemiological picture.  

3. If scaled globally, our solution has the potential to improve quality of life and decrease the burden of diarrhoeal disease for populations dependent on inadequate sanitation and unsafe water sources. Currently, an estimated 50% of the global population lacks access to safely-managed sanitation.
   

Safe sanitation remained inaccessible to over 50% of the world population, contributing to nearly 1 million deaths in low- and middle-income countries. Inadequate sanitation and unsafe water supply contribute to diarrhoeal disease, which is a leading cause of global childhood mortality and morbidity.  Poor sanitation is estimated to have cost $255 billion in disruption to economic productivity and healthcare costs in 2015.  The United Nations posits that, in order to achieve its Sustainable Development Goal of access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all by 2030 (SDG6), scale must be achieved at a quicker pace. 

This is particularly pressing for nations such as South Africa, where 55% of water treatment plants do not meet effluent standards.  The harm experienced is ecological, but is also measured in the health and economic impact on the community.  Especially around informal settlements, the improper disposal of faecal waste in river systems and open lots increases the health risk of a population already experiencing high HIV burden. 50,000 litres of sewage flow into South Africa’s rivers every second, and even though seasonal flooding can spread pathogens from contaminated water systems, water quality data often fails to be included in disease prediction analytics. 

Our solution will develop a complete system to collect, treat, and process human waste, managed by a single ICT system that combines sensors of ecological, biological, and pathogen data with AI and machine learning to predict disease outbreaks. This system will process faecal-sludge waste to eliminate pathogen reservoirs and create an economically valuable product (biochar), sequestering carbon in the process and incentivizing proper waste disposal.  

Our solution utilizes pyrolysis, a process involving the thermal decomposition of sewage at elevated temperatures in an inert atmosphere, enabling the conversion of waste to biochar with no GHG emissions and killing pathogens. Thus, we can sustainably convert waste to an economically valuable product. 

To monitor our impact, we aim to create and synthesize novel data sources, including sensors for the autonomous detection of waterborne pathogens, terrestrial environment, satellite EO, and GNSS data, and toilet usage data. This data can be systematized in a sharing platform for analysis, with findings made publicly available.  Through the use of AI and machine learning, we aim to increase the understanding of linkages between different environmental factors. Furthermore, this process will iteratively respond to feedback from community members to improve our approach and maximize benefit for stakeholders.

Our solution serves the community located in the outskirts of eThekwini, in South Africa particularly those living in informal settlements. There are nearly 500 informal settlements in Durban, with over 1 million residents, and these communities rely primarily on public toilet blocks for toilets, showers, and handwashing facilities. Inadequate waste disposal from these facilities puts these communities at heightened risk of waterborne pathogens and diarrhoeal illness from local water sources. 

Our solution aims to address these risks by providing an intervention that can predict and prevent outbreaks of waterborne diseases. Further, this solution has the potential to drastically change the environment in which this community lives by eliminating faecal waste dump sites, improving water safety, and reducing the health costs associated with flooding events. 

Community center near the toilet blocks will also be enabled with wifi.  Users can answer questions and receive hygiene information while using the wifi, enabling the project to better understand and adapt to usage practices. Ultimately, in addressing widespread issues of water safety and sanitation, this solution has the potential to be adopted in communities facing similar issues, serving the billion poorest people around the world.

Contaminated wastewater that might otherwise end up in river systems, can be treated with a sustainable method of pyrolytic carbon sequestration.  This health risk is particularly relevant in Durban’s informal settlements, where lack of infrastructure means poor water quality and inconsistent waste disposal.  Rather than address these challenges individually, our solution links natural hazard mitigation, water quality monitoring, and carbon storage.  The circular economy of waste management, enables safer waste disposal, reduces risk of water source contamination, and further unlock financial capital by connecting proper treatment to the commercial market for biochar.

Our solution is currently in the pilot stage of development as the pyrolysis of waste and data collection system have been tested as viable and is currently being readied for its first implementation in Quarry Road Informal Settlement and Parkington-Thandanani Informal Settlement, two communities outside of Durban, South Africa. This initial deployment will include approximately 1450 households and will involve a community participatory aspect to evaluate the intervention and to ascertain the specific needs and/or necessary changes in the local context (as identified by community members themselves). After refining the intervention with the input of locals, it will then be expanded to other communities an further scaled.

This solution is innovative in that it takes a market-based approach to an ecological and public health issue, creating financial incentives and community economic benefits while eliminating the pathogen reservoirs created by improper waste disposal and landfills. We aim to convert materials which currently present a threat to the health of this community into an economically-valuable product. This enables the process to be financially self-sustaining and incentivizes effective and safe waste disposal via community benefit-sharing. We believe that, in doing so, this approach will have a powerful impact on community hygiene behaviors and sustainably reduce the incidence of waterborne diseases. 

We are able to monitor the efficacy of our approach by integrating continuously-collected sources of data in traditionally separate spheres (pathogen sensing, water use and hygiene practices, satellite and earth observation, to name just a few) to create a detailed real-time picture of community health, environmental conditions, and epidemiology of waterborne diseases. By applying the use of machine learning, over time, this technology will be better able to link and predict trends in the association of these factors. 

Our solution will have long-term impacts in shaping the urban environment. The sequestration of carbon from human waste as biochar can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and landfill inputs and open up peri-urban land for beneficial use.  Overall, improved community health and reduced burden of diarrhoeal disease can potentially have far-reaching behavioral and social impacts, such as improving school attendance and fostering a mutually beneficial relationship of human wellbeing and ecosystem services.

The pilot demonstration will serve local communities using managed community ablution blocks at informal dwellings in the eThekwini Municipality comprising approximately 450 dwellings at Thandanani and 1000 dwellings at Quarry Road, as well as those affected by sanitation-related waste entering the local river catchments. The faecal sludge treatment solution is being deployed at the Municipality’s waste treatment treatment facility. Following a successful pilot demonstration, key markets include South Africa, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Senegal serving between 29  and 32 million people. This is based on expected tenders and focuses on population centres where existing faecal sludge collection is occurring. 

The Boston Scientific Group issued a Smart Sanitation market forecast in 2018 stating that the market would be worth $6bn. Of this, over 50% is in emerging or third world markets. Woodco Bioscience estimates that 20% of the emerging market is likely to add health monitoring to Smart Sanitation solutions. The countries factoring health monitoring are those who are most affected by ill-health, but these systems are in their infancy and will be required to “prove” themselves. 20% of the emerging market represents 10% of the overall smart sanitation market, hence we estimate this as the addressable market for a combined sanitation and health monitoring solution. This would be a market of 2.5m - 3.2m people served. With an average of 10,000 people initially served per unit. This equates to approximately 300 systems with health monitoring services in these markets in over five years.

The smart management platform facilitates automated measurable indicators and reporting to assess our progress. The system can measure how much faecal sludge is treated daily; how much biochar, thermal and electrical energy is produced; what temperature is reached and its impact on pathogenic material. The goal for the pilot demonstration is to treat approximately 1.5 tonnes of faecal sludge of 70% solid matter daily, producing approximately 0.5 tonnes of biochar with 100% removal of pathogens and approximately 22 GJ of energy. Positive detections of sanitation-related pathogens in waterways will be geolocated and visualised via a “heat-map” from the sanitation management platform. In-laboratory testing will be used to corroborate results. User-feedback as well as user-monitoring will be used to assess impact on community engagement rates. Specific stakeholder value chains will be continually assessed and updated in response to user-feedback and further development work.

The Institute for Technology and Global Health is closely collaborating with Woodco Bioscience.  Woodco Renewable Energy, is an Irish company that has developed an award winning “waste-to-energy” system that is being deployed as part of the sanitation pilot study. This project was selected by WHO/ITU as a 2021 Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health.  The underlying technology won Ireland's Enterprise “Innovator of the Year” and “Green Product Award” at the Green Awards in 2019; as well as the “Green Business and Sustainability Award” at the Green Awards and “Innovator of the Year” at the Small Business Awards in 2020. In 2018, the company partnered with Mindseed, an ICT and space technology company founded in 2011, under an ESA funded “Space for Sanitation” project to explore the feasibility of deploying space-assets in support of sanitation services.  The partnership has resulted in a new company, Woodco Bioscience. The solution evolved under the partnership to integrate space assets and the latest in Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to not only support the waste treatment solution, but to consider the broader sanitation ecosystem from a social, economic and environmental perspective. The combined solution received the prestigious seal of excellence from the European Commission in 2020. The solution is now in demonstration phase and is being piloted in the Municipality of eThekwini, in South Africa, where we have partnered with the University of Kwazulu-Natal (UKZN) who have extensive experience conducting research within the local informal dwellings where the pilot is being conducted.  The consortium also receives support from ESA and the Toilet Board Coalition.

Equitable distribution across a range of characteristics is inherent to the team, including gender, race, age, and delegation of responsibility. Importantly, implementation of the solution is driven by the local community of residents who themselves are diverse across age and gender. Their input and information on local conditions helped to inform the solution. The broader team is comprised of scholars and industry experts who also vary across age, race, gender, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Although I - Khahlil Louisy - am in the driver's seat for this project and a researcher at Harvard University, based in Cambridge, MA, I draw from my experiences growing up in an underdeveloped island in the Caribbean. My interest in economic development and public health comes from my experiences in communities that are heavily constrained by resources. Also significantly is the lateral structure of the team, which distributes authority equally. 

The Institute for Technology and Global Health is a non-profit organization that is committed to diversity, inclusion, and equity. This is reflected in the organization's leadership team which has a current 50-50 male to female make up, and diverse across race, age, and socio-political beliefs.

The Solve Challenge and the Solve community's focus on the development of high impact, technology-enabled solutions aimed at addressing the world's most pressing challenges, is perfectly aligned with the mission of our organization - the Institute for Technology & Global Health (ITGH). At ITGH, we actively pursue avenues through which the application of technology can lead to improved public health outcomes and is driven by a robust research agenda. But solving (pun intended) the world's pressing challenges, requires active collaboration among those bold enough to tackle them. That is because the challenges are complex and require weaving together methods drawn from interdisciplinary approaches and expertise. This is one of the biggest draws to the Solve challenge - being part of a vibrant community of passionate, mission-driven organizations and individuals who are as relentless as we are in our pursuit of developing solutions capable of improving and transforming human lives. 

We believe that the Solve network coupled with our drive, can get us there. Mentorship and insights from organizations and experts who have been bridging the gap between technology and government is vital. In our work, this has been a persistent issue, governments are not well-equipped to handle the adoption of new technologies efficiently. This is a significant challenge and one that we will need assistance with.

We will need experts across the domains of human resources, business development, financial, and legal to help us with structuring the collaboration between non-profit, for-profit, and government. What is the ideal business structure that can drive change while maximizing returns? How do we pitch such a structure to investors who may not be familiar with these operational processes? What are the legal and regulatory hurdles that must be navigated? How should we navigate global supply and distribution channels? These are all questions which we are navigating and having experts to provide guidance would be beneficial.

While we have an incredible team of research and industry experts, having partners with substantial experience working with governments would be invaluable. Organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have made tremendous headway on issues of global sanitation and have deep expertise working with governments. Their insights from previous implementations, research, and experience in the space could help us to further shape our approach to sanitation challenges. 

As we are an organization driven by research to demonstrate impact across economic, health, and social dimensions, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation would be an ideal partner because of our alignment on the economic impact of technological development and their applications to solving public challenges.  

Other partners of interest are Atlassian for their expertise in custom software development and APCO Worldwide who can help us with the development of a modern, agile, mission-driven organization.

Our solution can advance the economic, financial, and political inclusion of refugees as the issues of inadequate sanitation and improper waste disposal in informal settlements are also prevalent in refugee camps, which are often temporary and lacking in infrastructure. In particular, the pyrolysis plants used in our solution to transform waste into economically viable biochar could be integrated into the waste management systems of refugee settlements to both reduce disease outbreaks and promote refugee resilience and self-reliance. Further, our focus on including the insights of locals through participant-driven research can empower refugees by including them in the implementation process of an intervention, from which they are often excluded.

Our project lays the foundations for a public health system that is resilient to environmental disease risks and able to track and predict outbreaks, creating safer communities with reduced burden of disease using smart technology. Simultaneously, the elimination of waste from landfill or improper dumping sites beneficially transforms the urban environment, creating safer water systems and restoring green space and complex ecosystems. Our solution is sustainable both environmentally and financially: pyrolysis enables carbon-capture in the generation of an economically valuable product (biochar) from waste with zero CO2 emissions, generating electricity in the process. Overall, we aim to create an integrated and resilient ecosystem monitoring and management system to significantly reduce the burden of waterborne disease. If granted the GM prize, we would look to scale up our solution to other communities with similar needs, with a focus on community participation and adapting to local context and stakeholder input. 

Our solution can advance the economic, financial, and political inclusion of refugees as the issues of inadequate sanitation and improper waste disposal in informal settlements are also prevalent in refugee camps, which are often temporary and lacking in infrastructure. In particular, the pyrolysis plants used in our solution to transform waste into economically viable biochar could be integrated into the waste management systems of refugee settlements to both reduce disease outbreaks and promote refugee resilience and self-reliance. Further, our focus on including the insights of locals through participant-driven research can empower refugees by including them in the implementation process of an intervention, from which they are often excluded.

Diarrhoeal disease has implications in particular for pregnant women, who are more susceptible to illness. The risk and consequences of dehydration for pregnant women are more severe than for the general population. Diarrhoeal disease can result in dehydration, which may impact amniotic fluid composition, foetal development, or induce preterm labor. While our solution does not target women specifically, the technology has potential to enhance women and girls’ quality of life by: (1) reducing rates of illness that may cause girls to stay home from school and, as a result, reducing the need for mothers to stay home to take care of their child and/or the impediment to completing the necessary tasks around the home, (2) empower women by including their insights into the implementation of this technology within their own communities via participant-driven research, potentially offering them an opportunity to voice actionable opinions and go against gender norms.

Human waste that is put into landfill or dumped illegally eventually degrades, emitting greenhouse gases. Biowaste degradation in landfills is a significant contributor to CO2 as well as other GHG emissions. Our solution will use pyrolysis as a method of carbon capture and sequestration, eliminating human waste from degradation in landfill and converting it into a valuable product. Indeed, research suggests that pyrolytic carbon capture and storage, currently demonstrating 30-50% efficiency and could achieve carbon sequestration efficiencies upwards of 70% (Schmidt, 2018) . This biochar can then act as a carbon sink, particularly if used as an agricultural input, where biochar will be converted to fine particles that eventually are sequestered in groundwater or sediments. The use of this carbon capture method and the repurposing of this waste will be shaped by input from the local community, creating a product that is economically and environmentally valuable for stakeholders. If granted the GM prize, we would look to  employ methods to quantify the impact of our intervention, demonstrating efficacy to secure other sources of funding and expand our efforts to other communities facing similar challenges. This carbon-capture method is a valuable avenue for the many places where faecal waste is currently disposed of in landfills. The use of pyrolysis technologies may serve both to eliminate GHG emissions from landfills and to spare this land for the creation of green space, which also enables carbon capture by complex plant ecosystems.

Our solution involves a complete system to collect, treat, and process human waste, managed by a single ICT system that combines sensors of ecological, biological, and pathogen data with AI and machine learning to predict disease outbreaks. This system will process faecal-sludge waste to eliminate pathogen reservoirs and create an economically valuable product (biochar), sequestering carbon in the process and incentivizing proper waste disposal. Further, to monitor our impact, we aim to create and synthesize novel data sources, including sensors for the autonomous detection of waterborne pathogens, terrestrial environment, satellite EO, and GNSS data, and toilet usage data; this data can then be systematized in a sharing platform for analysis to increase the understanding of linkages between different environmental factors through AI and machine learning. Importantly, while our solution places emphasis on PyCSS to address the issues of GHG emissions and water contamination via the repurposing of waste into biochar, AI and machine learning is crucial as it allows us to ensure the effectiveness of the pyrolysis as an evaluative safeguard.