<aside> 💡 We realized after talking to multiple people at various organizations that work to solve open defecation (SOIL, UNICEF, WaterAid, The Nigerian Government, CAWST, etc.) that the factor which drives this problem heavily is motivation.
If there is a will there's a way, but in this case, there is not a large will.
We're solving this by turning feces (which has a very similar amount of carbon in it as wood) into charcoal, and taking the profit made by selling charcoal and giving it back to Nigerians so that they stay incentivized to keep defecating in the toilet. If they stop defecating in the toilet then they stop getting this external source of income.
We're paying people to defecate in toilets by selling charcoal.
</aside>
5 Components Of The Solution:
The purpose of the shell of our toilet is to be a place for people to sit on when they're defecating or urinating, and to also make sure that we reduce the smell of the toilet when it's being used. To do both of these things we'll use the top half of the design from the nano-membrane toilet:
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/fbe1bfb2-79c7-45e2-b8a4-7c6be6858f07/mpa.mp4
We'll be making the gears, bowl, scrapper, and outside shell of our toilet from polyethylene because it is cheap (0.32cents/pound), readily available in Nigeria, and can withstand the heat temperatures that our kiln (a device that turns feces into charcoal) will radiate out (see appendix for calculations). If we were to make our cover our entire toilet with polyethylene we would need 1273.6 lbs of it, however factoring in the L shape of the toilet and that we'll replace the bottom half with our kiln, we will likely need around 254.72 lbs instead (see appendix for more in-depth calculations).
We'll be getting this material from Prima Corporation LTD and we know that they're capable of manufacturing this because in the past they have made things like Moulded Furniture, Insulated Boxes, etc.
Once the bowl rotates 270 degrees this'll move the waste downwards band into our kiln. A kiln is a device that turns wood into charcoal but we're creating our own version of a kiln that turns feces into charcoal.
What makes our kiln different is that we add metal sheets of aluminum to cover the waste from the rest of the kiln. If we put organic material like raw feces and urine into a kiln, this will expose the hot metal coils & bricks to bacteria and water (from evaporation) which can affect the efficiency of our kiln and cause the coils to be brittle. We validated this with associates at Jen Ken Kilns, one of the world's largest manufacturers of an electric kiln.
Heating coil is the black stripes that would turn red.
Even if we create our kiln we can't use it unless we have energy. We'll need 60 watts of energy to actually power our kiln to turn a family's one month worth of waste into charcoal. We'll be doing this via solar energy and we'll source them from Rubitec Solar and we know that they're capable of manufacturing this because in the past they have specialized in "bringing vital electricity to the most remote areas at reasonable costs with Solar Energy". This is precisely what we require as 44% of Nigeria has no electricity in the first place so we need to install new infrastructure.