SOIL’s Circular Economy Solution for Urban Sanitation

SOIL is a non-profit research and development organization working in Haiti since 2006 to design, test, and implement transformative models to affordably and sustainably increase access to cost-effective full-cycle household sanitation services in urban communities. SOIL’s flagship social business, EkoLakay, simultaneously addresses the interconnected crises of poor sanitation and environmental degradation by leveraging an innovative circular sanitation economy model uniquely poised to meet the needs of rapidly expanding urban areas. For a small monthly fee, EkoLakay provides households with desirable container-based toilets, weekly waste collection, and safe treatment and transformation of wastes into compost using a process that exceeds World Health Organization (WHO) standards. By transforming the waste from cities into organic fertilizer, SOIL’s circular economy solution provides a global example of how to stop the spread of waterborne disease, restore ecological nutrient cycles, reduce water pollution, increase food security, and nurture resilience to the climate crisis.

It is estimated that only 34% of urban Haitians have access to sanitation facilities, meaning more than 3 million people in urban Haiti lack access to improved sanitation. As a consequence, Haiti has the highest rates of childhood diarrhea in the world and is currently battling one of the largest cholera epidemics in modern history. This crisis is mirrored in urban communities around the globe where an estimated 700 million people lack access to safely managed sanitation. While aquatic ecosystems are polluted from human wastes, the earth’s soil nutrients are rapidly declining due to erosion and intensive agricultural practices, leading to reduced food production, poverty, and malnutrition. Nowhere is this cycle of poor sanitation, environmental degradation, and poverty more evident than in Haiti, one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations which loses nearly 40 million megatons of soil is to erosion annually.  

In rapidly growing urban areas, the lack of suitable sanitation technologies and business models has meant that providing affordable sanitation has been a particularly intractable problem around the world.In contrast to SOIL’s regenerative circular approach, traditional sanitation technologies have focused on treatment and disposal instead of critically needed restoration of ecological nutrient cycles through resource recapture. 

SOIL’s primary beneficiaries are urban residents without access to safe, dignified sanitation. This beneficiary group is comprised of families living in impoverished urban and peri-urban neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien, Haiti where traditional sanitation technologies have proved impossible to implement. Secondary beneficiaries include farmers who use the compost and people living in environmentally degraded areas where reforestation efforts are underway. SOIL’s work is also poised to serve as a global proof point for the possibility of providing circular economy sanitation solutions that are economically and environmentally sustainable to some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. 

SOIL remains committed to working with local communities to ensure our solutions successfully meet real, rather than perceived needs. SOIL’s work is iterative by design and we have incorporated community feedback at every stage of the process, from toilet design and construction to compost sales. Our efforts to engage communities in improving the service include regular customer satisfaction surveys, reliable complaints mechanisms which allow our team to respond quickly to customer concerns. In a 2017 customer satisfaction survey, over 97% of families reported that their quality of life in regards to safety and health had improved since joining the service.

SOIL’s circular sanitation system is low-cost, avoids reliance on energy and water inputs, safely contains and treats waste, and offers valuable resource recovery. The service is comprised of the following elements:

> Toilet manufacture – SOIL’s toilet is manufactured in Haiti from locally-available materials for less than $40 USD each. SOIL trains local contractors, many of whom are women, to construct the toilets meeting SOIL’s design and quality specifications. SOIL’s toilets are user-approved, durable, easy-to-repair, disaster-resilient, and affordable even before economies of scale. 

> Toilet installation – Once a potential customer indicates interest, signs the service contract, and pays the installation fee, a toilet is installed in their home. Installation is relatively straightforward from a technical perspective as the toilet is lightweight and can be moved around in the home depending on a customer’s needs and preferences. The installation process largely centers around customer education on the topics of hygiene, how to use and maintain the toilet, and how to use the service.

> Toilet servicing – All customers on SOIL’s EkoLakay service are guaranteed weekly waste collection which entails a SOIL Collector coming to their homes to collect their full containers of waste and deliver sanitized empty containers and carbon cover material that serves as the “flush” in the dry toilets. SOIL Collectors use customized 3-wheel motorcycles or hand carts to reach customers and then deliver the full containers of waste to a transfer station where they are then transported to SOIL’s waste treatment facility.

> Container emptying – Containers of waste from the EkoLakay service are emptied into compost bins and covered with sugarcane bagasse, a byproduct of a local rum production. The containers are then washed with a chlorine solution and returned for use in the EkoLakay service.

> Treatment and transformation – The composting process is an elegantly simple environmental technology which harnesses the power of ecological processes rather than energy to safely treat waste. The full bins of waste are monitored carefully to guarantee sufficient temperatures have been reached throughout the bin to ensure pathogen die-off. After a treatment and decomposition period of six to nine months, the completed compost is tested for pathogens, sieved and bagged for sale. 

> Compost Application - Unlike traditional soil amendments available on the market in Haiti, SOIL’s compost restores soil structure to increase yields year-after-year, improves drought tolerance of soil, and increases root growth for long-term plant health and soil carbon sequestration.

SOIL’s initiative is one of the most promising tests of the paradigm-shifting hypothesis that sanitation no longer needs to focus on the linear model of waste disposal, but rather on the ecologically beneficial reuse of human waste within a circular economy model. With nature as our inspiration, SOIL designed an innovative sanitation system that simultaneously restores the environment to its life-giving potential, prevents the spread of waterborne disease, creates livelihood opportunities, uses less water, and emits few greenhouse gasses than traditional sanitation technologies. SOIL’s solution protects aquatic ecosystems while restoring soil fertility in vulnerable communities, increasing soil carbon sequestration. Nutrients, such as Nitrogen (N) and Phosphorus (P), that would have otherwise leaked into the water, the atmosphere, or ended up in landfills are safely returned to the soil.

Conventional sewerage is non-existent in Haiti and is unlikely to become the prevailing paradigm even in the long-term for rapidly growing urban communities globally. In markets with unreliable water and energy access, sewer systems are not practical, affordable, or safe. The most common toilet model currently built in these communities is the pit-latrine, which puts users at risk of waterborne diseases and contributes to climate change through methane emissions. SOIL’s revolutionary solution represents a significant breakthrough in the sanitation field and opens the potential of scaling rapidly in urban communities lacking sanitation services. Our solution has also proved resilient in one of the most uniquely challenging and high-risk environments, charting a pathway for safe sanitation services in resource-poor urban settlements. 

Since 2006, SOIL has designed, tested, and refined sanitation technologies that are uniquely suited to rapidly expanding urban settlements. In contrast to traditional resource-intensive linear sanitation systems, the container-based toilets SOIL pioneered have a lower capital burden, require significantly less water and energy to operate, and require no infrastructure. Additionally, the technology has been intentionally designed to be low-cost, safe, and natural disaster resilient, making them more practical and safer for coastal communities with high groundwater tables and increasing the risk for flooding events. While the core hardware of our service is low-tech by design, SOIL employs innovative technology elements to enable customer service best practices, rapid scaling, and cost efficiency. These elements include a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) database that updates in real time with customer location coordinates, service requests, and monthly service fee payments, a mobile money service that allows customers to pay their monthly service fee through mobile banking, and an SMS platform to enable SOIL to quickly and efficiently send customer service alerts.

SOIL’s waste treatment technology exceeds standards set for the safe treatment of human waste by the WHO. New research is demonstrating that SOIL’s composting waste treatment sites prove a climate-positive alternative to traditional waste stabilization ponds by emitting up to 90% less greenhouse gases through the treatment process. 

SOIL’s work is creating transformative change by inspiring a new way of conceptualizing human waste as a valuable resource critical to creating sustainable social and economic systems, and to restoring ecological systems that have been disrupted by human activity. Additionally, SOIL’s circular economy model for sanitation service delivery helps affordably meet Sustainable Development Goal 6 to provide universal access to sanitation and hygiene.

> SOIL’s solution is lower cost than other sanitation solutions and generates earned revenue to support sustainability.

> SOIL’s solution is proven to work in high-risk, l0w-resource settings.

> SOIL’s solution requires very little infrastructure and is affordable even before economies of scale.

> SOIL’s solution works in densely-populated informal communities currently unreachable by other sanitation technologies.

SOIL’s solution confers positive externalities not present in linear approaches to sanitation.

> SOIL’s solution restores soils, increasing agricultural yields and improving climate adaptation.

> SOIL’s solution reduces water consumption compared to flush toilets and prevents water contamination.

>SOIL’s solution doubles the absorptive capabilities of soils, increasing their resilience to flooding and drought.

SOIL’s solution is user-approved.

> Over 88% of EkoLakay users report improvement in personal health.

> Over 90% of users report having been able to save money after switching to SOIL’s service.

> Over 96% of users report that their family’s personal security has improved as a result of EkoLakay.

For further evidence of SOIL’s impact to date and our rigorously-tested design, see a collection of peer-reviewed papers: https://www.oursoil.org/resources/publications/

SOIL’s sanitation service currently provides affordable and safe household toilets with full waste treatment services to over 1,000 families (reaching over 6,000 people). Within 12 months, SOIL will be reaching 8,000 people and within 5 years, SOIL will be reaching over 35,000 people. 

SOIL has demonstrated that it is possible to provide cost-effective safe, dignified, sustainable, full-cycle sanitation services in some of the most impoverished urban communities in the world. Over the next year, we hope to continue to scale our service while continuing to invest in R&D and business improvements to leverage economies of scale to further reduce unit costs. Within 5 years, we plan to be serving 15% of the Cap-Haïtien population with safely-managed sanitation, proving a model for affordable sanitation service delivery that can be replicated by other businesses in Haiti and globally. Our ultimate goal is to revolutionize the approach to sanitation provision, proving a scalable and replicable model to provide sanitation access for the 700+ million people living in urban communities who currently lack sanitation access.

Logistics improvements – EkoLakay’s customer relationship management (CRM) system utilizes a combination of Salesforce, Taroworks, and GPS data points. We’re now able to easily collect customer data and location using smartphones in the field, and we want to use this information to improve route optimization and service logistics. We also see further need for investments in improving the processes of our service to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

Financing – A significant barrier we face in Haiti is that our target market has a very limited ability to pay for sanitation services. This means that SOIL needs to raise co-financing to ensure the sustainable delivery of services. As we work to put in place a public-private partnership model for sustaining services, we seek support to refine our pitch and widen our network of supporters.

Logistics Improvements – SOIL is working with research partners to improve data analysis, route optimization, and processes to further increase efficiency and reduce costs.

Financing – SOIL is working to build a base of individual monthly donors, or Cultivators, who can help provide a resilient funding source to overcome the challenges of working in a high-risk context. SOIL also strives to replicate the innovative results-based financing models used in other sectors to help create a sustainable revenue for service delivery that can help with the transition to long-term public sector finance.

SOIL currently has 77 full-time staff, 86% of whom are Haitian. Overall SOIL has very low staff turnover and invests significantly in staff capacity. SOIL’s Directors report to a volunteer Board of Directors made up of members of the community of donors, volunteers, and allies of the organization who display the professional experience, dedication, and responsibility needed to lead SOIL. 

Since 2006, SOIL has pioneered approaches to sustainable sanitation in Haiti that combine innovative service delivery models and new technologies with a strategic, catalytic approach to financial sustainability. Although SOIL’s implementation efforts are focused solely in Haiti, SOIL has been recognized as a global thought leader in the sector for our efforts to transparently share lessons learned through peer-reviewed publications and active engagement in sectoral dialogues. We believe that our successes in building EkoLakay, which we first piloted six years ago, into the growing social business it is today is a result of our commitments to local collaboration, entrepreneurship, and capacity development. For thirteen years, SOIL has been led by Dr. Sasha Kramer and a leadership team with expertise in ecology, business administration, sanitation, public health, engineering, and agronomy. As we prepare to scale our sanitation service, we’re heavily investing in staff capacity development and recruitment efforts to ensure we’re proactive about continuing to build a team that’s ready to grow our impact. We are honored to have received recognition for our transformative work from the Schwab Foundation, Ashoka, the Nature Conservancy, Dubai Expo Live, and others.

SOIL is the sole implementer on this project, however, SOIL is dedicated to working in collaboration with a range of institutions, organizations, and stakeholders to coordinate efforts and improve program delivery, and iteratively inform implementation and support knowledge-sharing. SOIL is a founding member and active participant in the Container Based Sanitation Alliance (CBSA), which is working to support the development and replication of similar models globally. SOIL works closely alongside the Haitian government and has conducted research on SOIL’s business model, climate impact, and sanitation technologies in collaboration with a range of partners around the world, including but not limited to: the University of California, Merced, Allegheny College, and others.

Over the past five years, we have provided affordable, safe, in-home sanitation access to urban residents, over 90% of whom previously had no access to improved sanitation, at a user fee of less than $2.80 dollars per household per month. This beneficiary group is comprised of families living in impoverished urban and peri-urban neighborhoods where traditional sanitation technologies have proved impossible to implement. Taking an iterative approach, incorporating beneficiary feedback at every point, we have built a cost-effective, user-approved sanitation service that is now poised to grow rapidly. 

SOIL’s goal as a non-profit is to develop a sustainable financial model for the provision of urban sanitation services, which can be replicated and brought to scale by the private and public sectors in Haiti and serve as a model to be adopted in rapidly expanding cities around the globe.

SOIL is already able to significantly improve the affordability of sanitation services to the public sector by using low-cost technology and transforming waste into a resource. Revenue from user fees and compost sales also help offset implementation costs. Ultimately, SOIL’s goal is to create a cost-effective sanitation service that can be sustainably financed by the public sector to ensure the long-term provision of the service at an affordable price point for resource-poor communities. 

SOIL is inspired by the bold and innovative spirit of the Solve community and sees great potential in being able to further refine and expand our innovative solutions to the global urban sanitation crisis alongside Solve and its partners. Beyond benefiting from collaboration with Solve members, SOIL hopes to leverage the financial support from Solve to expand our circular sanitation service in Haiti, proving to be an open-source solution that can be scaled and replicated in Haiti and globally.

(1) Interdisciplinary research partners: SOIL works at the nexus of sustainable development, public health, engineering, social entrepreneurship, and resilience, and we seek interdisciplinary long-term research collaborations that can support our efforts to scale sanitation services in vulnerable urban communities in Haiti and to disseminate learnings from this work to replicators globally.

(2) Logistics and tech experts: We are excited that Solve’s community of members includes a wide range of innovative companies as we are looking to learn from others as we improve our logistics and bring new tech solutions to reduce our costs and increase our impact.

(3) Funding organizations: SOIL’s upfront capital expenses, unmet operational costs while we scale, and research and development are funded by prize funds, foundations, and individual donors. Introductions from Solve can play an important role in expanding SOIL’s impact in Haiti. 

SOIL’s circular-economy approach to sanitation meets the criteria for the GM Prize for Circular Economy by supporting communities in shifting towards a more circular economy through zero waste and zero carbon. SOIL will use prize funds from the GM Prize on Circular Economy to expand composting waste treatment services, safely transforming an increased amount of human waste into rich, agricultural-grade compost to support soil restoration, agricultural production, reforestation, and climate resiliency. In addition, GM Prize funds will be used to support SOIL’s ongoing research into the positive climate impact of sanitation services, further making the case for climate financing for sanitation scale-up. 

Lack of access to sanitation services has a disproportionately negative effect on women and girls, as they are more vulnerable to violence when seeking a place to defecate and they are the primary caregivers for relatives sickened by waterborne disease. Especially for nighttime use, a private household toilet is a significant improvement from a shared or public option, particularly for women and girls. SOIL and Stanford University found in a 2013 study that prior to having a SOIL toilet, only 30% of our customers reported feeling safe from physical or sexual assault when using their primary sanitation option; that share increased to 91% after a SOIL toilet was installed. In a recent survey of SOIL’s customers, an astonishing 97% of clients shared that their personal security improved after joining the service. SOIL will use funds from the Innovation for Women Prize to increase the number of women and girls accessing our in-home sanitation service and to support the replication of household sanitation services globally through research and information-sharing.