What is the social or environmental issue being addressed?
Globally, 2.6B people lack access to safe, dignified sanitation. Government under-investment into infrastructure, increasing urbanization and crisis-related displacement have resulted in large populations lacking access to safe, proper sanitation. Providing non-sewered communities scalable improved sanitation will incur huge economic costs (for piping, collections, treatment) and unsustainable stresses on local water resources. In non-sewered communities, people must resort to unsafe sanitation options like open defecation and shared pit latrines.
Innovation:
change:WATER Labs develops disruptive frugal water technologies, including a revolutionary evaporative toilet to clean up off-grid and non-sewered communities by shrinking daily sewage volumes 85-99% onsite—its portable, low-cost and stand-alone toilets leverage super-water-absorbent polymers to passively vaporize liquid sewage, thus enabling complete sanitary containment, waterless and off-grid operability, and 10x reduced collections logistics.