Toilets with Purpose. No water. No Germs. No Question!
SUMMARY
Loowatt designs and manufactures high quality, waterless flush toilets that could significantly improve access to adequate sanitation and hygiene where it is most needed. According to the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children’s Fund, 60% of the global population does not have access to safely managed sanitation, meaning that untreated waste from 4.3 billion people enters our environment every day.
Loowatt toilets offer a safe and simple solution with a patented flushing technology that locks in odour and disease without using water or chemicals. The lack of effective sanitation results in disease as well as indignity. The challenge of creating a waterless toilet, and finding ways to process and exploit the waste for energy production, fertiliser and other uses has been the challenge that Virginia Gardiner decided to tackle as a student at the RCA. However, this was not just a student graduation project but a personal mission and she became the Founder and CEO of Loowatt. growth. She built a team, developed the technology, products and service systems and Loowatt now successfully operates toilets and waste processing in a range of contexts, from outdoor events in the UK to easy-to-install, outdoor toilets for homes in Madagascar.
Loowatt’s patented toilet integrates revolutionary waterless flush technology with a 360-degree waste processing system to deliver hygienic and safe toilets for both permanent and temporary off-grid installations around the world. From the Loowatt Home toilet, designed for domestic use, to the Loowatt Pod toilet for commercial applications.
Virginia Gardiner
CEO and Founder of Loowatt
Virginia holds a joint Masters in Innovation Design Engineering from the Royal College of Arts and Imperial College London and a BA from Stanford University.
Applying Empathetic Engineering Principles
This solution required Virginia to understand the social and cultural barriers associated with using toilets, and how these differed across the world. This also required Virginia to innovate a new business model – not just providing portable toilets but designing of an entire system from toilets to waste management and processing into energy and other products and creating an attractive business model for local entrepreneurs and operators as well as a great experience for their customers or users. And depending on the environment and context for use it meant understanding all these stakeholders’ diverse needs. Designing a system to be used at say Glastonbury Festival, or a construction site in an environmentally sensitive area, or delivering an off-grid system to a rural community in Madagascar, means deep empathy with the communities, the users, the operators and the environment. Virginia understands this in depth an is perhaps the ultimate Empathetic Engineer.
