More than two-thirds of the world lacks access to sewage toilets, leading to massive environmental pollution and the spread of disease.
That’s true Loowatt comes in. The London-based company sells flushing waterless toilets used for urban and portable applications. It also uses a circular system, where waste is collected, processed and converted into biogas to generate electricity, cooking gas or organic fertilizer.
“We’ve built a link that takes human waste to a place where it can be safely and sustainably disposed of,” said Founder and CEO Virginia Gardiner.
The system also provides “a toilet experience similar to flush toilets,” she says.
How it works
Restrooms have containers that contain waste and are collected by a local service team, who take them to a waste disposal facility. A small portion of the waste is then separated into material for recycling or composting. The rest is chemical-free human waste, which is converted into raw material for energy and fertilizer.
There is also software for managing customer payments in emerging markets and for tracking usage and collecting data, which can be used to optimize services.
Two markets
Marketing has a two-pronged approach. For starters, it is sold in the UK and used at events and construction sites. “We’ve been used at some of the fanciest events in the UK,” says Gardiner.
In emerging markets, the system is primarily focused on residential properties, where households pay a monthly fee and toilets are cleaned once a week. For the past five years, the company has been testing them in Madagascar and now it’s diving into South Africa, a potentially huge new market. That effort is sponsored by the government, and Loowatt is partnering with “major carriers in the wearable sector,” Gardiner says.
Which entities receive the waste depends on a city’s infrastructure. In Madagascar, it is fed to a network of small, decentralized anaerobic digesters run by the city that convert waste into fertilizer and fuel, for example. In the UK, digesters are located at larger, more centralized utilities and the process becomes part of the wastewater treatment facility’s operations.
A growing interest in toilets
Gardiner first became interested in the toilet world when she worked for an architecture and design publication about 20 years ago. Covering a kitchen and bath industry show in Orlando in 2003, she was disturbed to see what she perceived to be the culture of the industry. “It was all about water and resource consumption,” she says. In the toilet area, she assumed she would find revolutionary water-saving technologies, but came across very few.
After that, her interest in the area grew. She eventually decided to study industrial design in a joint program of the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. There she worked on a project that became the first version of the Loowatt toilet. In 2010 she started her company.
Switching the focus
Gardiner then spent the next four years refining the technology, focusing on a b-to-c approach in the UK and Madagascar. But she came to realize that in order to expand, she needed to work with service providers with a lot of infrastructure to deliver services, such as utilities or portable toilet service companies. In 2017, she founded a company in Madascar, run and operated by the locals to do the maintenance of homes and portable devices.
The company makes money from selling hardware, refills and toiletries, software and leasing waste treatment equipment.
Gardiner sees a growing interest in what’s known as no-sewage in urban areas in general, though she thinks it will be some time before the concept is widely embraced. “There will be a turning point in the coming years. But it hasn’t started yet,” she says.
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