Improved, sustainable sanitation for coastal communities

We are developing a drop-in toilet solution that avoids risk polluting groundwater due to high water-tables and frequent coastal disasters.

change:WATER Labs is developing a disruptive approach to sanitation and decentralized sewage management. We’ve developed a low-cost composite membrane that rapidly evaporates the water content of sewage, getting rid of 95% of daily outputs onsite—essentially a “shrink-wrap for crap”. Using this technology, we’ve developed the “iThrone”, a portable, waterless, evaporative toilet to extend safe, private sanitation to homes and communities with no power or plumbing. This “self-flushing” toilet works by collecting waste solids and liquids in a sewage-evaporating pouch of our membrane, which rapidly evaporates 95% of daily onsite sewage volumes without need for added energy, heat or flush-water. All that’s “flushed” out of our toilet is clean water vapor, leaving behind only a few grams of dried solids hygienically contained inside. Because our toilet is essentially “self-powered” and designed to eliminate onsite sewage almost as fast as it accumulates, it can be compact, keep things clean, install anywhere and is uniquely suited for crowded communities, cramped spaces and drop-in deployments. Our solution is an enabling tool for sanitation-servicers to improve service-delivery while lowering costs. Our toilet is the only non-sewered option to effectively replace flushing and the only scalable, sustainable option to support a planet of 10Bn people. 

No other no-flush toilet has the ability to eliminate onsite sewage quickly at low-cost. The trade-offs among the other no-flush toilet options are that, if they are low-cost, they are messy or slow to process/eliminate sewage, and thus not appropriate for use in urban homes or densely-populated communities. Alternatively, those no-flush toilets that can eliminate onsite sewage rapidly are generally costly, energy-intensive or are too large to fit in a home. 

Our proprietary material allows our solution to be the only solution that can quickly reduce onsite sewage volumes at low-cost. This capability confers huge operational and economic value to the customers (those who deploy and service decentralized sanitation infrastructure). So, once our customers adopt our solution, they will have high switching costs to switch to another solution, because no other solution reduces ongoing OPEX costs as ours does in our target market segments.

To complete our pilot and launch to the market in 2019. We would then aim to fulfill our first orders of 6000 units.

Given that the governments of India and China are purchasing >100M toilets in the next 2-3yrs, and aid agencies need to procure at least >0.5MM toilets/yr to provide emergency sanitation to 25-50MM disaster victims/yr (and currently have no good options for low-cost, low-maintenance drop-in solutions), we think we should be able to sell at least 150K toilets by 2022, and be impacting the lives of 7.5MM people. 

We will work with servicing partners on the ground to identify and market to our prduct to end users. As we are designing our product with dignity as a top design principle, we hope we incorporate user preferences to facilitate adoption and retention.

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in 2019, in deploying 11.5K toilets, we expect to be impacting 0.5MM people. By 2022, we expect to have deployed 150K toilets and be impacting the lives of 0.5MM. 

We are passionate, resourceful, resilient and inspiring. We are a multi-disciplinary covering business strategy, VC investing, water tech development, applied materials, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, international development, and water treatment systems design. We are very skilled at balancing technology development and pragmatic go-to-market/business considerations.

We will be selling hardware (toilets) and software (replacement sewage-evaporating collection pouches). Over time, as our toilet install-base grows, our sales will increasingly be dominating by replacement pouch sales (razor/razor-blade model). We expect to achieve profitability by year 2 of sales. We will launch lean by relying on deployment and servicing partners in the many markets.

We would greatly benefit from crowdsourcing of input to help us improve our design and go-to-market strategy.

Markets for sanitation are fragmented, and we don't have time to understand all markets or prioritize market opportunities. The Solve crowd can help us to deepen our understand of markets and help us with that prioriziation