Tag: Source-separating sanitation systems

Our group’s spinoff company, Sanitation360 AB, was recently declared the winner of the Skapapriset for Gotland, where the company is based. The jury on Gotland was of the opinion that the S360 team (Jenna, Björn and Prithvi) were very good representatives for Gotland. S360 now moves onto the final round, where we will compete with companies from all the Swedish counties.

The SKAPA Prize is Sweden’s largest innovation award, with the aim of providing support to inventors to develop their ideas. SKAPA is a foundation founded in memory of Alfred Nobel in 1985 and awarded its first prize in 1986. Behind the foundation stands the Stockholm Fair and the Swedish Inventors’ Association supported by Almi Företagspartner AB, VINNOVA, the Agne Johansson Foundation and the Patent and Registration Office. The prize is first awarded at the county level, where all county winners receive SEK 10,000, then nationally.

The group’s startup company, Sanitation360 AB, is taking part in the Create the Future Design Contest, which was first launched in 2002 by the publishers of Tech Briefs magazine to help stimulate and reward engineering innovation. Our entry which is called “Save the world by going to the bathroom!” puts forward our research and development of the urine drying concept, where the idea is to convert human urine into a dry, safe, nutrient-rich solid. The most popular entries will be decided by the voting of registered users of the contest web site. So help us by going to this website, where you can register as a user and vote for Sanitation360!

Click here to Vote for Sanitation360

Our intern Chinmoy Deb from India, has successfully completed all his theory subjects at SLU for the Mater’s program “Soil, Water and Environment” in a duration of one year. In his theory subjects, he had worked with soil-water systems and Geochemical modelling.  Chinmoy has opted for a “One-year Master Thesis” for the rest of the credits left. He was here last year for the completion of his Bachelor’s thesis on Urine Drying Technologies. This year, in continuation with his previous work, Chinmoy will be focusing on different methods and medias for urine drying. Primarily, he’ll be concentrating on reclamation of water from human urine.

We congratulate Jenna Senecal for a well performed defence of her PhD thesis “Safe Nutrient Recovery from Human Urine – System and Hugiene Evaluation of Alkaline Urine Dehydration”. It was a great discussion with the opponent Professor Chris Buckley from University of KwaZulu Natal, followed by the discussion with the evaluation committee, Ana Soares Cranfield Water Sciences Institute, H.B. Wittgren VA-Syd & Sweden Water Research, Helvi Heinonen-Tanski University of Eastern Finland, Malgorzata Krzywonos Wrocław University of Economics and Business and Sofia Boqvist SLU. If you missed it the event is available on the Energi och teknik Facebook page. The event was performed online as well as with an audience in the room, with social distance, in total there were 22 persons in the room listening and up to 36 persons following the dissertation online, it worked well, even if we were missing the interesting post seminar discussions with all involved persons.

Congratulations and welcome to SLU, we look forward to continue the collaboration in the future. Program Manager Madeleine Fogde is a trained teacher and currently program manager for the Swedish International Agricultural Network Initiative (Siani), which is coordinated by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI). Siani has a broad membership base and is a very inclusive organization that offers an attractive network for people working with agricultural research globally. She has worked extensively with low-income countries in Africa, including in a water supply and ecological sanitation program in Mozambique. She has a large worldwide network in agriculture, sanitation and women’s organizations.

On 7th February, we inaugurated our new urine-diverting toilet here at the department of energy and technology, at SLU’s Ultuna campus. The installation was made possible due to a grant from SLU-climate fund that financed the installation together with the Save! Urine diverting flushed toilet from Laufen and SLU’s landlord Akademiska hus. The existing conventional toilet was exchanged with the new Laufen toilet “Save!” as a permanent installation. The urine is led out from the wall and connected to the test bed (the larger box on the side into where the urine drying equipment is installed).

Towards the end of January, Jenna Senecal and Viktoria Wiklicky from Kretsloppsteknik were in Tampere, Finland to decomission our 25 L/day urine drying system that was in operation at the basement of Lielahti Manor house. The system was in use in between June 2019 and January 2020, and was a great showcase of the group’s and Sanitation360 AB’s on-site urine treatment technology, alkaline urine dehydration. Through this project, we demonstrated to our various Finnish partners that our technology is scalable, socio-technically feasbile, and marks a significant step away from erstwhile urine processing technologies. We are very thankful to our various collaborators, partners and stakeholders that helped make this a successful pilot project – Tampere City, Tampere University of Applied Sciences, Hiedanranta Development Programme, city workers, officials, plumbers, subcontractors, research interns, and others.