by Lucas Kanver, The HuffingtonPost,
For two years, David Auerbach worked as a teacher in China's Hunan Province.
Though he believes his time was well spent, his stomach turned picturing some of the outhouses and unfortunate sanitation options people along the countryside had to utilize every day.
"I realized how much I took healthy sanitation for granted," said David, recalling the time he spent in the region. "We forget how in-your-face and prevalent this issue is in the rest of the world. People shouldn't have to live like that."
Indeed, according to the World Water Council, 2.6 billion people lack access to adequate sanitation and waste management services, and 1.8 million children die from resulting diseases.
"The clean water campaign—that's a little easier for people to latch onto," he said. "But I think sanitation gets a little more complicated."
David, who will receive his M.B.A from MIT this weekend, hoped to address some of these issues. Then, in 2009, he took a class called "Development Ventures," which challenges students to come up with a practical business solution to a pressing global issue.
As he set the foundation for his project, he asked himself a few key questions. "How do you get people to use toilets? Can people operate them in an affordable manner? And what do you do with the waste?"
The class ended, but the team kept the project going, assembling a crew of MIT architects, designers, business students and engineers. They called the project "Sanergy" and set plans for the future.
"We were all on the same page," David said. "It was something we all believed in."
The team focused specifically on the situation in Kenya, where the slum population stands around eight million. Many Kenyans resort to open defecation, or have to pay to use privately owned "pit latrines."
"There's no good way for them to use their waste," David said. "They dump it into the river or chuck it into open spaces."
Sanergy developed a unique process. First, they'd build sanitation centers, providing clean toilets and sanitary hand-washing under a strong concrete structure. The waste would then be collected in "air-tight containers," which local Sanergy employees then take to a central processing facility, converting the waste into biogas or fertilizer.
"Each toilet is a franchise," David said. "It's owned and operated by a local entrepreneur. They can then devise a viable income from that."
Click here to read the rest of this article at HuffingtonPost.com.
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