Slum dwellers have already seen their lives improve dramatically with Sanergy’s groundbreaking initiative to convert human waste into fuel throughout Kenya. Katerva intends to make their work global.
Poop will power the world if Katerva has their way. A UK-registered charity organization which uses crowd sourcing to annually identify, award & accelerate ingenious ideas that will enable the global community to live sustainably, Katerva has announced that this year’s Grand Prize will go to Sanergy.
Founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) alumni, Sanergy is building sanitation centers throughout Kenya that harvest human waste to make energy. Their program is financially stable, socially responsible, and environmentally conscious, and it now has the support of an elite group of organizations who will pool their resources to accelerate Sanergy’s work.
(Here’s another green toilet designed for India’s slum dwellers.)
The 500 experts and thought leaders who took part in a 12 month review process to choose an idea that has the most potential to make a global expert believe very strongly that “Sanergy has the capacity to fundamentally change the way in which we all live and interact with the planet .”
Pretty soon, we’ll all be cooking with power produced by our very own poop. More information about both groundbreaking initiatives – Katerva and Sanergy – is available on their respective websites.
Author: Tafline Laylin
As a tour leader who led “eco-friendly” camping trips throughout North America, Tafline soon realized that she was instead leaving behind a trail of gas fumes, plastic bottles and Pringles. In fact, wherever she traveled – whether it was Viet Nam or South Africa or England – it became clear how inefficiently the mandate to re-think our consumer culture is reaching the general public. Born in Iran, raised in South Africa and the United States, she currently splits her time between Africa and the Middle East. Tafline can be reached at tafline (at) greenprophet (dot) com.
