Description:

Rural Haiti has been facing a sanitation and waste management issue. With no plumbing or running water, permanent outhouses are being built as bathroom facilities - however, it is difficult to relocate the waste, the latrines are at risk of destruction from natural disasters, and most importantly they are expensive to fabricate, resulting in half-assembled facilities that are useless to the population. The Arborloo team is currently designing an inexpensive and sustainable solution to these problems. An arborloo is a mobile latrine that sits on top of a shallow pit that holds the waste. It will be fabricated with materials found easily within Haiti and designed to be built by the people in Haiti. Some key design features include the ability to remove the arborloo once the pit is full (and plant a tree in its place), collapse the arborloo when high winds are approaching (avoiding structural damage), and upgrade/replace parts as the family earns more money for a higher quality latrine.