I used to be on the Zandvlei Protected Areas Advisory Committee (ZPAAC) for a few years. We were a group of people, both volunteers, residents in the area, and City employees tasked with managing the estuary, or ‘vlei’ in Afrikaans, hence the name. It was heavily impacted by poor design and construction choices in the 60s, in the form of the Marina da Gama estate, primarily, but also inappropriate urban density upstream, both formal and informal (backyard dwellers upstream with insufficient service delivery, and not enough toilets). So it needed constant management – rewilding was simply not an option.
This workshop was held at GreenCape on the 22nd of February 2019, the event description is available at a previous post: https://indiebio.co.za/distributed-bioeconomy/ The raw notes can be downloaded here. From the introduction it was clear that there is an emerging ecosystem and there are enough skills and ‘ecosystem components’ in the room and wider to make this work. There is enough of a realised need from higher income markets to test it out in a complex country like South Africa (as a nation, too high income to rely on donor funding, but too poor and with too weak governance to effect changes in the way a rich country would be able to, if it wanted to.)
Or maybe, ‘the Metaverse and all that shit.’ Anyways, this post is about my plans for 2019:
Augmented reality game, think Fortnite (actually more ‘Metaverse’) meets water research (Actually, waste management). Or, visualising big data for everyday people.
Focus: dealing with biomass that may be or have potential to become hazardous
Case study: 1) container based sanitation (CBS) and 2) urine beneficiation, catering to the sanitation service delivery to higher LSM markets in South Africa.
More information, event write-up and discussion here:Â https://indiebio.co.za/distributed-bioeconomy/Â
Focus: dealing with biomass that may be or have potential to become hazardous
Case study: 1) container based sanitation (CBS) and 2) urine
beneficiation, catering to the sanitation service delivery to higher
LSM markets in South Africa.
It’s reckoning time. The Separett Villa that I received as a gift and then had to haul across Northern Europe #humblebrag is finally installed and in action.
This post has been in draft for ages, but we got the research money to start the project and already a partner or two lined up, so it’s become urgent 🙂
Your shit could look like this. (image from Mycoworks – mycelium bricks)
When I started the dry toilet journey I was only aware of one incinerating toilet brand. Separett was synonymous with ‘the creme de la creme of dry toilets’ – incinerating or otherwise. After visiting Mikael and his team I think my loyalty to Separett is rock solid, but it turns out there are other incinerating toilet companies out there. I have a Separett Villa 9000 to test out, but I think the designs need to change a lot for large scale urban use – read on.
Disruptive Innovation Festival (DIF)
UnSchool’s Creative Change Makers session
I’m participating in the DIF, in the unschool session number 3 . The DIF is an online platform that aims to inspire action towards a circular economy, with a focus on Cities in Transition (etc). This is a result of a previous session I gave to the Unschool crowd in Cape Town, presentation at this post. #thinkdif
