Sell ​​waterless toilets and create a circular waste system

More than two-thirds of the world's population do not have access to sewered toilets, leading to massive environmental contamination and the spread of disease.

This is where Loowatt comes in. The London-based company sells waterless toilets with flushing, used for urban and portable applications. It also uses a circular system, by which waste is collected, treated and converted into biogas to produce electricity, cooking gas or organic fertilizers.

"We've built a nexus that brings human waste to a place where it can be treated safely and sustainably," says Founder and CEO Virginia Gardiner.

In addition, the system produces "a toilet experience comparable to that of a flush toilet," she says.

How it works

The toilets have containers that hold the waste and are collected by a local service team, who take it to a waste treatment facility. A small part of the waste is then separated into material to be recycled or composted. The rest is chemical-free human waste, which is turned into feedstock for energy and fertilizer.

There is also software to manage customer payments in emerging markets and to track usage and collect data, which can be used to optimize services.

Two markets

Marketing takes a two-pronged approach. For starters, it's sold in the UK and used at events and construction sites. "We've been used at some of the UK's fanciest events," says Gardiner.

In emerging markets, the system is primarily aimed at households, where households pay a monthly fee and toilets are serviced once a week. For about five years, the company has been testing them in Madagascar and is now launching in South Africa, a potentially huge new market. This effort is government-sponsored, and Loowatt is working with "leading vendors in the wearable industry," says Gardiner.

The entities that receive the waste depend on the infrastructure of the city. In Madagascar, it is fed into a network of small decentralized anaerobic digesters operated by the city that convert waste into fertilizer and fuel, for example. In the UK, digesters are installed in larger, more centralized utilities, and the process has become part of the plant's operations for waste water treatment.

Growing interest in toilets

Gardiner first became interested in the restroom industry when she worked for an architecture and design publication about 20 years ago. While covering a kitchen and bath industry show in Orlando in 2003, she was troubled when she observed what she perceived to be the culture of the industry. “It was all about water and resource consumption,” she says. In the restroom section, she assumed she would find breakthrough water-saving technologies, only to encounter very few.

After that, his interest in the area grew. Eventually, she decided to master industrial design engineering through a joint program run by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. There she worked on a project that became the first version of the Loowatt toilet. In 2010, she created her company.

Change of focus

Gardiner then spent the next four years refining the technology, focusing on a b-to-c approach in the UK and Madagascar. But, it realized that in order to grow, it needed to work with service providers that had a lot of infrastructure in place to provide services, such as utilities or portable toilet maintenance companies. In 2017, she started a locally owned and operated business in Madagascar to service homes and laptops.

The company earns money through the sale of hardware, as well as refills and sanitary consumables, software and the rental of waste treatment equipment.

Gardiner sees growing interest in so-called sewerless sanitation in urban areas, although she thinks it will be some time before the concept is widely adopted. “There is going to be a tipping point over the next few years. But it hasn't started yet,” she says.