[WM]To help solve this problem, Andrew Foote and Emily Woods started Sanivation— No. 55 on the BI 100: The Creators — a sanitation startup that installs in-home toilets in East Africa and turns the waste into briquettes of sustainable, environmentally friendly fuel.
Foote and Woods came up with the idea for turning waste into fuel as undergraduate students at Georgia Tech in 2011. The pair developed a thermal treatment system for human feces as a research project and later entered their work into Start-Up Chile, a business accelerator in South America.
In Naivasha, where outdoor pit latrines are the norm, the mention of an in-home toilet led many to immediately picture an open latrine inside their home — not a preferable alternative to the outdoor version. So Sanivation branded their version as "blue boxes" to dispel the negative connotations potential people had with the word "toilet."
Sanivation combines two waste streams in a metal bucket — human excrement and carbonized agricultural biomass waste, which comes from things like sugarcane gas, corn cobs, rose farms, and rice husks — and heats it to a temperature that neutralizes harmful pathogens and allows the waste to be transformed into a briquette of fuel.