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The Santa Martha Design Project
The document summarizes information about the town of San Rafael del Norte and the nearby Santa Marta community in Nicaragua. San Rafael del Norte has around 800 inhabitants spread across 104 families and 87 households. It lacks basic amenities like electricity, drinking water systems, and sanitation facilities. Health issues are common due to poor water quality. The school is in poor condition with broken infrastructure, 6 teachers receiving low salaries, and around 100 students enrolled up to 6th grade. Nearby Santa Marta also has housing in poor shape and inadequate sanitation, with high illiteracy rates.
The Santa Martha Design Project
- 1. SAN RAFAEL DELNORTE
- 2. •founded in 1848 •averagetemperature21 C / 70 F • rain: 1200-2000 mm (47 – 79”) • 3600 feetabove sea level • 16,320 inhabitants. 24% urban. •15 miles south of Santa Martha ABOUT SAN RAFAEL DEL NORTE
- 4. -800 inhabitants -104 families -87households -There is no electricity -There is no drinking water system - Main health problems are due to poor quality of the water: diarrhea and parasites. -There is also a high incidence of respiratory deseases, especially among children. -SCHOOL: •schoolistotallybroken • 6 teachers •teachersreceiveaneconomic “help” fromthegov. of aprox $21/month •threeclassrooms • 100 students in total (up to 6th grade) Hydration, Sanitation, Respiration, Education SANTA MARTA COMMUNITY
- 5. -Many houses arein poor shape -Out of the 87 houses, 3 have water and 35 have latrines -Illiteracy rate is high…some workers are not able to sign their own name
- 6. 6 Month OldCoffee Canopy Forest
- 17. Rain Water Catchment andStorage for Drinking http://www.akvo.org/wiki/index.php /Rooftop_rainwater_harvesting
- 18. Phillip's Philanthropy ByDesign- Chulha stove http://www.design.philips.com/philips/ sites/philipsdesign/about/design/desig nportfolio/philanthropy_by_design/chu lha.page
- 19. Bañoseco – drycomposting toilet Methane-producing digester toilet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg7_hPZnT 9g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WCv4-_- nwk
- 20. Chulha Stove: LifeCycle
Editor's Notes
- #18 The EMAS filtration system Two houses are connected to a rainwater capture unit, then a spout provided from the tank. Photo: Insieme Si Puo' in AfricaThe EMAS system for rainfall collection uses various EMAS technologies as well as simple tools to convert rainwater into usable drinking water. If roof rainwater is being used, it is collected through a regular gutter. To filter the water, at the bottom of the gutter, a pitcher or ferrocement tank is placed, with an outlet pipe. A synthetic cloth bag is attached to the rim of the pitcher using an iron ring or wire, which fits around the edge. The bag should be cleaned every 3 months. As water begins to collect, to avoid too much garbage collecting here, first some amount of water is deflected, along with most of the garbage. Hereafter, water can be directly sent to an EMAS Cistern. It is advisable for multiple cisterns to be available for storage, depending on the size of the roof. Connect one cistern at a time to the outlet pipe. From here water can be pumped and distributed using a regular EMAS pump. The pump can also be connected to faucets and tanks around the house.
- #19 To address this issue, a group of NGOs partnered with Phillip's Philanthropy By Design and local Indian women to develop a much more efficient smoke-free stove called the Chulha. Made from local materials, the Chulha stove is easy to clean and maintain and it filters and directs smoke outside to improve indoor air quality.Read more: Chulha Stove Could Help Stop 1.6 Million Smoke Inhalation Deaths | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building
- #20 Yesterday (October 19th) was the United Nations’ designated World Toilet Day. While it is maybe not the most appealing over-the-dinner-table subject, there are many many reasons to devote time to thinking about – and re-thinking the design of – our toilets.There are sanitary, environmental and social reasons to dedicate time and resources to creating accessible and appropriately functioning toilets. Proper disposal of waste prevents spreading contagious diseases, untreated and unprocessed raw sewage contaminates fresh water, and our society just doesn’t accept people - especially women – just going anywhere. Venturing out into the dark to find a place to relieve yourself can be a very scary venture as a single woman. But while they have drastically improved our quality of life, toilets as most of us know them also have some serious environmental consequences. Toilets help us reduce the spread of disease and contaminants in our own home and property, but the sewage systems in industrialized countries creates a - not-in-my-backyard problem of many peoples small amounts of waste and bringing it all together in massive pools that then need chemical treatment to process and use billions of gallons of fresh water in the process. There are in fact many other solutions to disposing of our waste – in our own backyards – and even turning it into products with net gain. Composting toilets provide social and sanitary solutions to our waste issues and also have many potential environmental benefits. And with some recent attention and funding from the Bill Gates foundation, toilets may soon earn us profits by creating electricity and producing high protein animal feed!Here is a slide show of some of my favorite Nicaraguan composting toilets: This is a hand made seat for a dry composting toilet. A dry composting toilet, or bañoseco, separates the urine from solid waste and doesn’t use any potable water to operate. Urine alone is a sterile, nitrogen-packed liquid, and breaks down quickly, so once it is separated it can be drained directly into a garden (best if the hose is moved around every now and then) or deposited into a bucket which can be emptied over a compost or fermented and applied directly to young crops. The solid waste falls into a container beneath the toilet. The container should be large enough to take at least a year to fill, and then the seat disconnects and moves over a second container. The filled container is capped and left to decompose over another year, at which point any harmful bacteria is burnt up in the fermenting process and it is a dry, rich organic fertilizer.The composting toilet is on a slope so the containers of dry waste can be accessed when they are full.A distinct benefit to the dry composting toilet over the standard outhouse is that it is the presence of urine that creates the foul odor associated with raw sewage, and so this outhouse has an earthy, fermented smell but it’s not unpleasant. Even though the design avoids any direct handling of contaminated waste, it is still recommended to use the finished fertilizer on perrenial crops or forage. This particular dry composting toilet is in coffee country, and so the family has directed both the urine hose and the dry fertilizer to their coffee plants. These dry separating toilets have become very popular in the region. Raleigh International, a british based organization that has been doing water projects in the area for years, recently helped to build and install 40 more toilets in a nearby community. This time they worked with a design that can be more easily mass produced than the hand built clay toilet seat – a concrete seat and base with metal walls. A few years ago a friend near us who owns the Barca de Oro Hostal on the Las Peñitas beach built four beautiful bamboo cabins with composting toilets in a lush green yard behind the hostal. She worked with a local fiberglass craftsman to create a system that fit her needs. Here is a rather glowing picture of the toilet, with the daylight dramatically lighting up the fixture in the dim light of the cabin. In her system, there is a system of pvc tubes that take the urine to a point far away from the cabins. A detachable fiberglass tank is fitted underneath the bathroom, so that instead of needing the space to put two containers in the bathroom, the filled fiberglass take is removed, capped and left to decompose and an empty one is attached.The new methane producing systems have ceramic bowls and don’t separate waste. Other than producing fertilizer, composting toilets can also produce methane, which can be used as cooking fuel. Also created using animal manure in bio-digestors, methane provides rural Nicaraguan women with an alternative to burning wood fuel for cooking – eliminated smoke and soot from the kitchen and improving the family’s risks of respiratory illness. One of the coffee cooperatives in the Jinotega has given members access to this type of composting toilet – and last Christmas when we went up to pick coffee for a few days we were treated to a breakfast cooked on fuel we helped produce!The sealed tank outside holds all the waste and has space to collect the methane. When it fills the fermented solids can also be used as fertilizer.Includes a clean new stovetop!
- #21 Two different cooking elements can accommodate different types of cooking needs, and all of the smoke is sucked through a very basic filter that directs it outside. The Chulha is a low-tech stove for healthy indoor cooking designed through Phillip’s Philanthropy By Design program. The stove has undergone many iterations since the project began and the project has involved local NGOs in India as well as stakeholders who tested the stove and gave feedback. The stove’s design is completely open-source and available for distribution as a way to encourage local economic activity and spread the project as far as possible.The goals of the project are to reduce indoor pollution and related health ailments, to respect local culinary habits and cooking behaviors, and to create an easily sourced and maintained stove with a low-cost that encourages distribution and scalability. After research, stakeholder meetings, and many design iterations, it also became necessary that the stove work off a number of different types of biomass and be able to cook in different ways (frying, steaming, boiling, etc) using various vessels.The result was a low-to-the-ground stove with a small place for building a fire fueled in part by a bypass duct to increase efficiency and decrease boiling times. Two different cooking elements can accommodate different types of cooking needs, and all of the smoke is sucked through a very basic filter that directs it outside. A soot collector reduces the amount of soot that reaches the chimney, reducing the need to clean the chimney, which can sometimes be dangerous and unhealthy. The stoves are made from of self-locking and modular concrete units, designed so they can be put together at home and then covered in clay. The stove has already received an INDEX:Award for its humanitarian design, and it was honored with a nomination for the ‘World Design Impact Prize 2011‘ by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID).Read more: Chulha Stove Could Help Stop 1.6 Million Smoke Inhalation Deaths Chulha Stove – Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building