Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet by Chelsea Wald

Author:Chelsea Wald [Wald, Chelsea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science, Life Sciences, Human Anatomy & Physiology, Social Science, Disease & Health Issues, Technology & Engineering, environmental, Waste Management
ISBN: 9781982116231
Google: 8PvtDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-04-06T23:19:43.535954+00:00

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Black soldier flies can feed on feces instead of food waste. AgriProtein’s sister company, The BioCycle, has been trying to make it work in Durban. Following a cholera outbreak in 2000, the eThekwini Municipality installed about eighty thousand dry toilets on its rural outskirts. At first, households buried the sludge from the new dry toilets on their properties. But, years later, the government realized that handling the sludge put people at more risk than originally thought; plus, people didn’t like to do it. The municipality needed to start collecting the poop. With support from the Gates Foundation, eThekwini and The BioCycle designed and built a large facility to process more than twenty tons of fecal sludge per day.

Since the facility opened in 2017, however, the project has had problems. For one, it had to confront trash in the sludge. That became a sticking point among the company, the city, and the contractor hired to empty and transport the waste. And while AgriProtein spends a lot of time optimizing the feed and the climate for the larvae in Cape Town, the Durban BioCycle facility was supposed to be low-tech—just an open shed—so that the concept could transfer to low-income contexts. But the larvae weren’t thriving. The company brought in mobile climate-controlled units, scaled back to a research and development operation, and started burying most of the delivered toilet waste nearby.

On top of the technical problems, there is also the question of who will buy the products. After all, potential customers are likely to be wary of the fecal origins until it is proven absolutely safe. And, in some countries, preexisting legislation prohibits the sale of the insects as feed for at least some animals. Still, The BioCycle would prefer to turn them into other types of high-value products. The maggot-derived oil could potentially replace palm oil, which is linked to massive deforestation in Indonesia, in industrial uses. And scientists are figuring out how to extract chitin, a fibrous substance found in arthropod exoskeletons that can be used in medicine as scaffolding for organs. Some are even developing uses for chitin in the fecal sludge treatment process. Today, most commercially available chitin gets extracted from shellfish waste through a polluting and expensive process.

Looking at the Swedish market, Cecilia Lalander of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala estimates that black soldier fly larvae are among the highest-value products that could be made from feces; the same is likely to be true in low- and middle-income contexts. In Kenya, the main sources of protein and fat for animal feed are troubled, says Frederick Wangombe, a veterinarian and animal nutritionist who mixes feed for farms. “Fish meal is seasonal, and prone to adulteration. Soybean meal has also become seasonal in the last couple of years.” The larvae, on the other hand, have the potential to be more consistent in both quality and year-round availability. He currently sources some from an enterprise called Sanergy, founded by three Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni,

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