Month: October 2015

By Sybil Lewis

Sanitation and the removal of human waste are among the biggest environmental health issues of our time. According to UNICEF and the World Health Organization, 70 percent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa lacks access to adequate sanitation—and in Kenya, sanitation coverage is available to only 41 percent of the country, largely because the government cannot afford or is not incentivized to cover the high costs of building pipes and sewage treatment plants in low-income areas. This leads to open defecation, fecal contaminated water, and disease.

To deal with this crisis, many non-governmental organizations are trying to come up with affordable and sustainable toilet solutions. One UC Berkeley student team and Big Ideas@Berkeley winner has been working in Kenya not just to increase sanitation services but to turn human waste into an energy solution—what they call “turning poo to power.”

Appropriately named Feces to Fuel, the four-member Cal team has been collaborating with Sanivation, a UC Berkeley- and Kenya-based organization that provides in-home toilets and waste collection services. Feces to Fuel’s plan is to collect fecal waste from Sanivation’s facility in Naivasha, Kenya and turn it into charcoal briquettes that can be sold at an affordable price and used as cooking oil.

According to Catherine Berner, a UC Berkeley graduate and member of the Feces to Fuel team, the creation of charcoal briquettes addresses another major issue affecting low-income populations in Kenya and throughout East Africa—the financial, environmental, and health costs associated with using traditional forms of cooking oil.

Berner, who majored in Environmental Engineering Science, explains that in many semi-urban and urban communities in Kenya the only available and affordable fuel sources are wood and charcoal, which have become increasingly unaffordable. Over the past decade, energy prices in Kenya have increased five-fold, and in Naivasha families are spending over 30 percent of their income on cooking fuel, hindering their ability to move out of poverty. Furthermore, burning crude forms of energy produces hazardous gasses, which are harmful not only to the environment but lead to serious health problems—more than half the deaths of children worldwide under age five are due to inhaling household air pollution.

Sanivation and Feces to Fuel have combined these seemingly unrelated problems to create a solution that both improves sanitation services and provides affordable fuel for low-income families.

But the enterprise is still very young. Sanivation launched its sanitation services in only September 2014. From its facilities in Naivasha, the social enterprise has been installing free in-home toilets, called Blue Boxes, for a $7 monthly subscription that includes twice weekly waste collection. In its first four months of operation, Sanivation signed up 57 customers for its in-home toilet and has maintained a 98 percent re-subscription rate. It aims to reach a million users by 2020.

Also over the past year, Sanivation has expanded its business model to turn the collected waste into energy, which is where Feces to Fuel comes in. Feces to Fuel is helping Sanivation identify and implement the best technology and method to transform human waste into a reliable fuel source. The project—which includes Cal students Emily Woods, Ken Lim, and Fiona Gutierrez-Dewar—is funded largely by an $8,000 prize from the 2015 Big Ideas@Berkeley competition in the Clean & Sustainable Energy Alternatives category.

“Before collaborating with Feces to Fuel, Sanivation was using solar concentrators to heat up the feces because their original plan was to turn waste into fertilizer, yet people were asking if they could use it to cook food,” said Berner. “Sanivation replied no because it was not safe yet, but what they realized is that there is a huge need for fuel created from treated feces.”

Andrew Foote and Emily Woods, the founders of Sanivation who developed their model while undergraduate students at Georgia Institute of Technology, said they have spent the past four years trying to figure out a reliable method of sanitizing feces using solar energy. Woods is now a PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley and Foote works fulltime on Sanivation.

In 2014, Sanivation started to develop a process that combines two waste forms—agricultural and human—to produce biomass-based briquettes for use in household stoves. The team now collects rose waste from surrounding flower farms, which otherwise would be burnt or discarded, and carbonizes the waste to create an energy dense charcoal dust. The rose waste biomass is then combined with human feces, collected from Sanivation’s in-home toilets, and heated up with solar concentrators to inactivate all pathogens, rendering the feces safe for use. The mixture of rose waste and feces is then placed in a machine, which turns the mixture into small briquettes.

According to Berner, the briquettes sold in Kenya are usually made with local organic waste or charcoal dust from traditional charcoal with trash-slurry as the binder. This combination produces little energy and lots of smoke, making it difficult to compete with charcoal. Whereas the energy-dense rose waste and high calorific value of feces used by Sanivation and Feces to Fuel produces briquettes that emit less smoke and burn longer than traditional biomass briquettes.

“Around the world and specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa, a lot of people are working on carbonizing agricultural waste into fuel and reusing feces for fuel,” said Woods. “We are carbonizing rose waste and using feces as the binder, which has never been done before.”

Other feces-to-fuel efforts have turned human waste into biogas, biodiesel, and fertilizer. Notable examples include the feces-biogas powered bus in the U.K and bio centers in Kenyan slums, which turn feces into biogas to power public showers. No other method, however, has used human feces to make briquettes for cooking.

While the number of feces-to-fuel innovations is growing, there is still a lack of research on the composition of feces and its potential for fuel. To develop its model, Sanivation relied on the work of few research organizations, such as the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag).

“I think that there is little research on the composition of feces, largely because of social stigma,” Berner said. “Human waste is just seen as that, waste, and not as a resource. For our model to work, we must find and show the value of waste.”

Sanivation conducted a beta test in mid 2014, in which 2,000 kg of briquettes were tested by families in Naivasha and the Kakuma refugee camp, along with small businesses and some industrial settings, to determine the best markets. Feedback from the beta test showed high customer satisfaction with the quality of the fuel; it also revealed that people are not uncomfortable with the idea of cooking with materials made with human feces. This is attributable to the fact that the briquettes do not look or smell like feces, said Berner.

Further analysis from the beta test showed that small businesses, such as hospitals and schools, are the key group for Sanivation to target, because they can provide consistent, mid-size orders, said Berner. However, Sanivation plans to continue working on sanitation in refugee camps in East Africa. The social enterprise received funding from the CDC’s Innovation Fund to design a system in the Kakuma Refugee Camp on the Kenya-South Sudan border. As part of the pilot for the toilet implementation, 30 families in the refugee camp tested their briquettes over a period of eight weeks.
During the summer of 2015, Feces to Fuel focused on improving the quality and manufacturing capability of the briquettes. In Naivasha, Woods, Berner, and Gutierrez-Dewar, implemented the Adam Retort, a carbonizer with high-energy efficiency and low pollution, which has been producing over 300 kgs of charcoal dust per week, according to Berner. The Berkeley team also helped Sanivation build out their waste treatment site and a greenhouse to study the potential of making fuel from dry waste.

Meanwhile in the U.S., Ken Lim, a UC Berkeley junior and member of the Feces to Fuel team, conducted research at MIT with experts in the briquette and charcoal field. Sanivation’s feces treatment method had already been proven to be safe for human use by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention; Lim’s role at MIT was to conduct more research to understand the composition of feces and its potential for fuel. The team is currently conducting further research on its briquettes at the Chemisense lab.

One of Sanivation’s main aspirations is to improve environmental health. If its briquettes can be sold at 60 percent the cost of charcoal, Woods said they will reduce the demand for traditional charcoal, offsetting the industry’s environmental impact that has left Kenya with 5 percent of its historic forest cover and contributed to climate change.

“We estimate that each ton of our briquettes saves 88 trees from deforestation,” said Berner. “Briquetting is taking off in Kenya. If we are able to prove our model, it will bring more attention to the briquetting industry and help replace the large demand for unsustainable charcoal.”

By Nicholas Bobadilla

In May 2015, Cristobal Madero, a Chilean native and PhD student in UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, invited 14 of Chile’s most elite high schools to participate in a novel educational experiment.

The motivation for the experiment was simple: to mitigate tensions between Chilean citizens and the Mapuche, a group indigenous to the country for 12,000 years. But the method was less straightforward: send high schools teachers to meet with Mapuche communities, so that the educators could bring back accurate information to their students—who are destined to become Chile’s leaders and will likely control the fate of this long maligned, and increasingly impoverished, group.

“The conflict between the Chilean state and Mapuche people has been in place for 500 years,” said Madero. “My question was: How is it possible that this problem is still there?”

In April 2015, Madero founded an educational organization called Kuy Kuitin, which means “building bridges” in the Mapuche dialect. To expand his idea, Madero entered Kuy Kuitin in the Big Ideas@Berkeley contest with Daniel Cano, a PhD candidate in history at Georgetown University whose research focuses on indigenous education in Chile and who also has a personal connection with the Mapuche people. A second place win in the 2015 Conflict & Development category enabled them to set their educational plan in motion.

“During the proposal process, Big Ideas contacted a sociologist specializing in Mapuche culture,” said Madero. “That was the key to going deeper and making the idea more realistic and rooted in the evidence and theory of multicultural education.”

Kuy Kuitin recently recruited five history teachers from the wealthiest schools in Santiago to shadow teachers in Mapuche schools for 10 days in April 2016. In addition to participating in activities within the Mapuche schools, the Santiago teachers will spend time with Mapuche families. Following the immersion, the teachers will incorporate information about Mapuche culture and history into their lessons and formally disseminate the information among their colleagues. Their students will later be surveyed to gauge the impact of the new curriculum.

Madero became familiar with the Mapuche and their history while in college, when he joined the Jesuits, a religious order within the Catholic Church known for dedication to service and social justice. In 2003, he took a two-week assignment with the Jesuits to acquaint himself with the culture and history of the indigenous group. He felt so activated by the experience that he has returned to learn from the Mapuche over the past 12 years, while working as a high school teacher throughout Chile, a master’s student in theology at Boston College, and most recently as a doctoral student in education at UC Berkeley.

“I developed relationships with two families that made me realize how the Mapuche people are treated and received,” said Madero in response to why he started develop his educational program. “That’s one side of the answer. It was personal.”

The other reason was grounded in Madero’s resolve to mitigate the ongoing conflict between the Mapuche and broader Chilean society. “I thought education would be a key to understanding and overcoming the problem.”
Madero said that Kuy Kuitin is targeting the wealthiest schools because in Chile the top earners control the country. “We don’t need to conduct research to know if wealthy people in Chile own all the mass media, own the forestry industry, have written the history of the country, have led the country… That’s a reality,” said Madero.

More specifically, the wealthiest students are most likely to assume the top political and corporate positions in the country, and as a result will have a hand in the Mapuche’s fate. In providing an alternate history, Kuy Kuitin aims to influence those who will be responsible for the social and economic future of the Mapuche and broader Chilean society.

The Mapuche have been the subject of violent and legislative displacement since the arrival of Spanish settlers in the 16^th century. In 1881, the Chilean government seized 90 percent of Mapuche territory and moved the natives onto reservations. In recent decades, forestry companies have destroyed their land and jeopardized their agricultural livelihood through commercial tree farming. As a result, many Mapuche have migrated to urban areas, where they take low-paying jobs and are forced to the margins of society. They suffer from unemployment and illiteracy, which create stigmas of laziness and incompetence and result in various forms of discrimination.
Radical as well as peaceful Mapuche groups have protested maltreatment, only to be met by excessive police brutality and discriminatory anti-terrorism laws. Complicit in their plight is the mass media, which has extrapolated the behavior of a radical minority to the entire Mapuche population.

“Because of the power a teacher has in a classroom, we might be able to convey that the Mapuche are not lazy, drunk, dark people who don’t like to work and that’s why they’re all poor. All those categories students in wealthy schools receive, they’re reproduced and they don’t do anything to overcome this,” argued Madero. “Maybe a teacher can be a good mediator of change.”
Although the project has proven controversial for students whose families have been responsible for the oppression of the Mapuche, Madero admits the reception by many of the schools exceeded his and Cano’s expectations.

“In Santiago, we invited 14 schools and received answers from six of the them. It was risky because we are telling them, ‘You are our target for this reason [wealth].’ But those six schools got the message and they really understand and want to make a change.”

The project was also well received by the other side. “The Mapuche have been very welcoming and allowed us to go beyond what we were expecting,” said Madero. They have invited the teachers on trips to museums and other Mapuche landmarks.

Nevertheless, Madero is aware that such a small project cannot transform centuries of discrimination. He sees education as a “starting point,” and a means to convince the Chilean elite that most Mapuche are not violent. “There is violence and an extremist group using force,” he said, “but 99 percent live peacefully.”

During the second half of the project, the high school teachers will design and submit a training manual to the Teacher Training and Experimentation Center of the Ministry of Education. They will also publish academic papers, write articles for local and national newspapers, and communicate their experiences via social media. A documentary filmmaker has expressed interest in capturing the project. The final stage of Kuy Kuitin will entail submitting a proposal to the Intercultural Education Department of the Chilean Ministry of Education to amend school curriculums. In the end, Madero hopes the government will implement affirmative action policies to ensure fairer access to housing, education, and employment for the Mapuche.

Education is not a panacea for the conflict in Chile, but Madero is confident about the impact Kuy Kuitin can have, and hopes the organization will serve as a starting point for lasting change.

“I’m convinced education can be a good tool, not the only one, 0to overcome a lot of social problems and conflicts. That’s a belief.”

Big Ideas winner and UC Santa Cruz graduate student Dustin Adams, who works in UC Santa Cruz’s Interactive Systems for Individuals with Special Needs lab, designed tool to recognize and describe photos.