Friday, February 14th, 2014

Time	Event
5:00a	The surprising value of waste In the “sanitation value chain,” human waste, with the proper infrastructure, is turned into a valuable commodity. Collecting, storing, and recycling waste into valuable byproducts, such as fertilizer, can create work and renewable resources, the thinking goes. Over the past three years, MIT spinout Sanergy has developed a model that impacts the entire sanitation value chain — from clean toilets to waste management and conversion — in a 500,000-person Kenyan slum, Mukuru, that lacks a modern sanitation system, helping the community stay clean and earn a living. This startup, its co-founders say, demonstrates that such value chains, if introduced in places like Mukuru, could be potential solutions to a sanitation crisis that affects 2.5 billion people worldwide. Across Mukuru — where people defecate in pits or, sometimes, in the streets — Sanergy manufactures low-cost, concrete-housed bathrooms called Fresh Life Toilets (FLTs). They franchise these toilets to local microentrepreneurs to run as Fresh Life Operators (FLOs). Sanergy collects and transports the waste to a processing facility, where it’s converted into organic fertilizer and, soon, other useful byproducts. “We’re removing waste and creating value from that waste,” says David Auerbach ’11, one of Sanergy’s co-founders. “As we do, we necessarily build out a market and that incentivizes everyone in the sanitation value chain to participate.” Sanergy’s other co-founders are Nathan Cooke, a former instructor in MIT’s D-Lab, Joel Veenstra ’11, Lindsay Stradley MBA ’11, and Ani Vallabhaneni MBA ’11. So far Sanergy, winner of the 2011 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, has erected 330 FLTs (with about new 25 toilets added monthly) and removed roughly 1,800 tons of waste. The waste is converted into fertilizer that’s sold to local farmers, who had previously relied on (more expensive) imported fertilizer. On top of that, the startup has created more than 350 jobs in Mukuru, a community with 40 percent unemployment. These jobs include roughly 170 FLOs, as well as jobs for those who construct and service the toilets and provide business support to the operators. Stories of successful FLOs have reached numerous media outlets. Auerbach recalls a recent story about a mother in Mukuru who had bought two FLT franchises, and had earned enough to buy land for her son to open two of his own. “When I see that kind of thing happening,” he says, “I realize that we’re doing something really, really good.” Sanergy has won numerous business and sanitation awards — from MassChallenge, MIT’s Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, and the Lemelson Foundation, among others — totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ingredients for a business plan The Sanergy model has its roots in 15.375J (Development Ventures), a class in MIT’s D-Lab that focuses on building entrepreneurial ventures in developing countries. Upon hearing that 8 million people in Kenyan slums lack access to proper sanitation, the Sanergy team conceived an idea to construct toilets as businesses in Kenya. A trip to Nairobi for a feasibility study — funded by MIT’s Public Service Center and the Legatum Center — confirmed the commercial viability of this model. Pay toilets were already in use, Auerbach says, but they were so poorly designed that regular waste-collection was impossible. And the locals running these toilets were struggling to turn a profit. “We saw so much entrepreneur spirit from people looking to change their community and earn a living,” Auerbach says. “That’s the moment when I started really thinking about turning Sanergy’s model from a project into a massive opportunity.” Raising about $25,000 from the Public Service Center, the team traveled back to Nairobi. They built two toilets — one in Kibera, one of the world’s largest slums, and the other in Mukuru, a slum of nearly the same size — and established a rudimentary system for collecting the waste and turning it into fertilizer.  Equipped with these “ingredients to put together a business plan,” Auerbach says — a proof-of-concept and a feasibility study — the team won the grand prize at MIT’s $100K. A few months later, Sanergy relocated to Mukuru (where it’s now headquartered) and opened its first toilet for business in late 2011. Today, each Sanergy FLT comes equipped with two removable, airtight waste cartridges — one each for liquid and solid waste — a trashcan, a sealed bin for sanitary pads, and a solar lantern, among other conveniences. People can use FLTs on an unlimited basis by purchasing a membership for roughly $1 a month. FLOs, collect the money and may derive extra income from selling hygiene-related products, such as toilet paper and soap. Each FLT costs about $600 (or $1,100 for two), which includes construction, waste collection, and business and other support from Sanergy. Partnerships with financial organizations such as Kiva, an online loan platform, allow Sanergy to provide zero-interest loans to vetted FLOs. Waste not Statistics point to 2.5 billion people worldwide affected by a lack of access to proper sanitation. But factor in where their waste ends up — dumped into rivers and waterways used for drinking, and leached into soil — and that number reaches closer to 4 billion, Auerbach says. “When it comes to sanitation it’s no longer a question of, ‘Can you bring someone a good toilet?’ If that’s the answer we would have already solved it,” Auerbach says. “You need to address the entire sanitation value chain to solve the challenge.” That system involves clean toilets, and collecting and converting waste into valuable byproducts, such as fertilizer, biogas, biochar (a type of charcoal), and even some plastics. Currently, Sanergy focuses on producing fertilizer, which it makes by composting the collected waste with sawdust and microorganisms. Funded primarily by venture capital and grants, Sanergy sells the fertilizer to Kenyan farmers, reinvesting the revenue into expanding its infrastructure. The startup recently purchased new technology to expedite the waste-to-fertilizer process. A high-tech facility in Muruku, currently in the final stages of construction, will convert the biogas — primarily methane and carbon dioxide, created from the decomposing waste — into a renewable energy source. Within a few years, Auerbach says, Sanergy hopes to install 1,000 FLTs across Mukuru and spread its operations across Kenya, the rest of Africa, and eventually South Asia and East Asia. But for now, he cautions, the company is staying put to ensure that its model is sustainable in Mukuru. “We need to get it right in the community we’re serving first,” he says. (Comment on this)
5:00a	Intellectual property August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “The Piano Lesson,” set in 1936, revolves around a sibling conflict over a piece of property: Berniece Charles wants to keep an heirloom piano that was first acquired when white slaveholders sold her great-grandfather in the 19th century; now it is owned by her freed family. Her brother Boy Willie, on the other hand, wants to sell the piano and use the money to buy land. The conflict is emotionally and ethically fraught: Should the family keep the piano as a reminder of its history and the past? Or sell it, to symbolically move on from that tortured history and turn past wrongs into practical gains? For Sandy Alexandre, an associate professor of literature at MIT, the play is an example of the complicated relationship black Americans have with material possessions — the subject of a new book she is developing. Contrary to stereotypes about blacks prizing flashy, dispensable goods, Alexandre says, African-American literature is filled with complex psychological and historical meditations about what it means to own property in a country where blacks themselves were once property. “I think literature tends to short-circuit that language of crass accumulation that we often find unfairly imputed to black people and their relationship to material possessions in popular culture,” Alexandre says. It is also a case, Alexandre suggests, where literature reveals larger truths about life and produces moments of social connection that would otherwise escape us. “What I love most about literature is that it facilitates empathy for, and acceptance of, other people,” Alexandre says. “It’s a space of virtual intimacy between human beings that creates the circumstances to enable actual intimacy in the real world. Life is big, messy, and sprawling. But a literary narrative organizes life and makes meaning out of it. There is something precious in that — in being able to hold the value of such meaning in your hand and eventually in your mind.” Alexandre’s specialty is historically grounded literary scholarship that digs into America’s turbulent past. Her first book, “The Properties of Violence” (University Press of Mississippi, 2012), examined black American literary depictions of nature, property ownership, and dispossession alongside their relationship to lynching in the United States. For such scholarship, Alexandre received tenure this year at MIT — where she delights in teaching and connecting with students, as well.  “As a teacher, especially in the context of MIT, one has to be ready to answer the question of what’s at stake in literature,” Alexandre says. “To have an answer for students, to feel like you have gotten through to them and had an impact, is very satisfying — and also a nice reminder to myself that the strong belief that your subject matters helps to enchant the teaching.” School and more school Alexandre says she never imagined becoming a scholar until she had nearly completed her undergraduate degree, when a supportive professor urged her to consider graduate school. She grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, with parents who had immigrated from Haiti. Her father was an electrician and her parents kept a strict Catholic household, speaking predominantly in Creole. “When I was young I did not anticipate that I would ever be a literature professor,” Alexandre says. She did, however, spend a lot of her time absorbed in books — from the Bible to “Gulliver’s Travels” and James Herriot’s stories about animals and their owners. “I did a lot of reading as a way of retreating into another world, as well as my own, mostly because I was, and still am, pretty introverted,” Alexandre explains. After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School, Alexandre was accepted at Dartmouth College, which she attended at the urging of a guidance counselor. “I needed to be in a place that would discipline my attention, and Dartmouth was that place; it was a great education,” Alexandre says. Near the end of her undergraduate years, a literature professor strongly suggested that she consider applying to graduate school. After taking a year off to work and study for her GREs, Alexandre enrolled in the PhD program at the University of Virginia, to the surprise of her parents, who were hoping she would become a doctor or a lawyer. “When I told my mother I was going to graduate school, her response was, ‘Didn’t you just graduate?’” Alexandre recalls with a laugh. Still, at that point she knew she preferred to pursue a career that would allow her “to acquire skills that made me passionate about teaching, and about conceptual problems that deal with literature and culture.” Created in history At Virginia, Alexandre developed her dissertation, which became her first book, after deciding to write about blacks and nature generally. As she soon realized, the history of lynching kept influencing the texts she was studying. “What the history kept telling me is there is something about the violence inflicted on black Americans, and popular images of dead black bodies in trees, that impinges on that relationship between representations of blacks and nature,” Alexandre says. Moreover, she adds, the study of literature often requires thinking in historical terms. “These cultural works are not created in a vacuum,” she says. “They’re created in history, in time, so they are necessarily in conversation with that history.” Circling back to her current book project, Alexandre cites Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man” as another classic in which material possessions convey a weighty sense of history. In the book, the main character comes into possession of, among other things, a chain link from a friend who spent years on a chain gang. “There’s something about these objects that the ‘invisible man’ encounters that allows him to feel, despite his many doubts, like he does indeed exist in the world, that he does matter, in both senses of the term,” Alexander says. Those possessions, again grounded in a fraught history, “are helping to ground the protagonist as well, helping him feel like he is present in the here and now, and giving him a sense of possibility for the future. We learn something about the way objects can be germane to a healthy and stable sense of identity.” (Comment on this)

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