The picture that came up in the first design round of a human excrete recycling system
Everybody will agree that the most beautiful solution for the degrading lack of sanitation in the endless square miles of shanty towns around the globe, would be a system where human excreta is instantly recycled again into food.
And this in a safe and clean way.
To this end Demotech's approach started with the design of a private toilet-unit: the 'BathroomBox'. Hi-Tech, low cost and locally manufactured, the picture is of the first prototype.
Then we envisioned newly created jobs in a new (yet old) profession of excreta collecting and recycling. We used a mockup to find out how a collector cart could be hauled through a very densely populated slum and how a No-Touch filling system would work. Our feel was that the dangerous feces should be burned to ashes and that the rather safe urine should be 'fed' to algae in shallow ponds.
As there would be no free space in such slums for the surface needed for these ponds, the obvious idea is to integrate the roofs people live under with the shallow ponds that best would be positioned higher up, to be safe from chickens, dogs, goats and playing kids.
Harvested algae out of such modular roof-pond elements would be the high-end base for the localized production of carbon and proteins containing organic products.
Well that is the dream!
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