Do you know how much water you use every time you go to the toilet? A conventional toilet It uses up to six liters in each flush, and since a person goes on average six times a day, their individual expenditure would be 13,140 liters of water in a year, equivalent to drink two liters of water diaries for 18 years.
However, there are entrepreneurship which are alternatives for reduce water consumption in areas for which it should not be used, such as transporting human waste, as is the case of WCeco.
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In interview with The Sun of Mexico, Jeinny Solis, director of said company, shared that in 2017 she made the decision to look for a project economically viable that would allow him to continue with his interests in sustainability and ecology.
As director of a ecovillage in training, he saw the need to find a solution to the lack of toilets and investigated the options dry baths that existed. By not finding a convincing option for the ecovillagechose to design and manufacture its own dry bath.
However, it was not until 2018 when he had the opportunity to present his ecotechnics during the International Forum on Reconstruction with Bioconstruction, where, upon seeing great interest in the people, he decided to launch the entrepreneurship developing a business plandoing market research and creating product prototypes until achieving a functional version.
“The first prototype I made was for the ecovillage, so it was financed by that project, but once I visualized it as a venture I had a partner and between her and I we contributed the resources for the operation of the first three years, which was more or less how long it took us to get to a point of balance. From there the company is already profitable and today there are more members.”
A company with a circular economy
Jeinny Solis He comments that at first the bathrooms were made of wood but, upon realizing that it is not a suitable material for a service sanitarylooked for new options, such as ceramic and plastic.
“Today it is made of plastic and we are convinced that it is the best option because it has a useful life of 25 years, and because despite being plastic, it will not be thrown away for a long time and is 100% recyclable once once its useful life ends.”
Likewise, he said that WCeco works like a circular economy company because it covers the entire product cycle, since they reuse buckets and jars from industries such as food and cosmetic.
“Are buckets before they had cheese, cream, shampoo either conditionersamong other things, and what we do is recover the buckets of this industries and reuse them in the service we provide,” Solís added.
Another example, he detailed, is the sawdust that they use for their services, which they recover from furniture manufacturing, carpentry or lumber companies. Material that, if not used in an ecological way, would end up in a landfill, but thanks to the processes they implement, it ultimately becomes fertile land.
“Both the disposal of our excreta and all the covering material we use goes through a very rigorous process that takes a year, where temperature, humidity, and other variables are monitored,” he says.
After completing this process, it is ready to be fertile land to reforest areas that have been cut down or whose trees no longer have foliage.
“We are reforesting precisely with fruit trees, which will not only allow us to recover edible forests, but will also produce more elements.
“In this way we fulfill the cycle full of soil nutrientseverything we get, Everything we eat and use comes in some way from nature.“Being able to return our excreta converted into fertile soil to the earth is precisely closing the nutrient cycle of the soil,” he adds.
He assures that this is important because from 1950 to the present 50 percent of our food feeds us half and this is because everything we extract from the earth, instead of returning it to the earth we send it through the pipeline to the seaand since we are all terrestrial animals, humans, Our excreta are designed by nature to reintegrate naturally into the soil.
“But instead of doing that, we mixed it with water and we send it through pipelinesin theory Treatment plantsbut one a lot of them don’t worksome work partially and a small amount works completely, this means that a large amount of our excreta ends up in the sea without any treatment and since in that ecosystem there are no microorganismsnor the cycle of nutrients necessary to take advantage of these materials, they end up polluting.”
“Every day we are suffering from what is known as water stress, and every day cities are approaching what is known as day zero, the day where city can no longer produce water“, alert.
“I think that The dry bath is the most revolutionary eco-technique that exists”, because it allows you to solve the first three main problems of humanity: health, access to decent sanitation and access to water, or at least not dirtying the water, which should never have been used to send our waste to the sea.
“I’m not going to say that we are sustainable one hundred percent, because we still have some things to resolve, but what I can say is that the intention of the company is to work every day so that each day one of our processes ends up being sustainable completely”.
The dry toilet is the most revolutionary eco-technique that exists, because it solves the three main problems of humanity: health, access to decent sanitation and access to water, or at least not dirtying it.
Jenny Solís, director of WCeco
Find an answer to every “but”
According to the director of WCecoone of the keys to your entrepreneurship is that he has dedicated himself to answering “buts.” “Many times he mentioned that people believe that I dedicated myself to doing bathrooms driedand in reality I dedicated myself to solving “buts”.
For example, “people see the bathrooms and say: Oh, well, that’s great, but I live in a department. Well, every time a “but” came up for me I resolved it and in that case I decided that what we needed was a home collection service and we implement it, today we are in nine cities”.
In the the project has been going on for five years have had a significant growth“so much so that today We are the largest company in Latin America that manufactures dry toiletsthe only one that has all these services that we offer (furniture design, manufacturing, sale, rental for events and homes, collection, processing of the collected material and reforestation of this material).”
Breaking paradigms, your challenge
“It has been a very long road, I don’t know if it is difficult, but it is complex because the only problem that a dry bath It really is people’s perception, the paradigms that we bring,” explains Jeinny.
“Me too at some point, when I met the dry bath more than 20 years ago, I thought it was unhygienicthat it would smell, that it looked ugly, etc., many ideas that people have regarding the dry bath (because) They often confuse it with latrines, with septic tanks, and a dry toilet is neither a latrine nor a septic tank.they are totally different procedures and processes.”
He paradigm older than We were taught from a very young age that excreta must be removed using water.and look what water is the most valuable element on the planet, only 2.5 percent of all water on the planet is fresh water, and we are using that water to transport waste. In other words, we are using the most valuable element on the planet to transport poop. The truth is that when I began to reflect on these paradigms, on these strange things that we do with water, I began to realize the urgency for us all to change to dry baths, because There is not a single being on the planet that can live without water. and yet, there is very little water available that we have for our uses.”
“Consume the resources of the future”
The entrepreneur considers that the biggest challenge is to find ways to break people’s paradigms, and that this has been achieved through events, “because there we have had the opportunity for people to use the bathroom and lose your fear.”
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Jeiny insists on the theme that the water that we flush down the toilet would be enough for us to drink water for 22 years:
“This means that In the first four years of your life you already used up the water you were going to drink in your entire life., then it is important that we all reflect whose water we have been consuming and who it should be. The answer is that to our children, grandchildren and future generations.
“I think that if we are so privileged to open a faucet and water comes outwhy that one privilege they don’t have it more than 2.1 billion people in the world, The least we should do is try to respect her and use it for what is truly necessary, such as take, cook, take a bath and wash clothes and frets”, he points out.