• News
  • Press
  • About
  • Contact
  • Shop
  • Club
  • Speaking
  • Consulting
  • Academy
  • Events
  • Blog
  • Reading Room
  • Clients & Cases

The Social Business Company ®

ENG / DK

  •  All Blog Posts
    •  Business models & strategies
    •  Communication & Branding
    •  Corporate engagement
    •  CSR & Sustainable Business
    •  Employees & Work-Life Trends
    •  Ethical consumption
    •  Future trends & visions
    •  Globalization Issues
    •  Leadership & management
    •  Shared value partnerships
    •  Social Entrepreneurship
    •  Social innovations
    •  Stakeholder engagement

Social Business

newsletter

Keep informed & inspired

News for you

Want our latest blog posts and articles with fresh insights, trends and cases straight to your own inbox? Sign up today to get our inspirational newsletter – so you can do good & do well even better!

Yes please – inspire me!

our key services

Trends & Solutions

  • Social Business
    Club
  • Social Business
    Consulting
  • Social Business
    Academy
  • Social Business
    Speaking

Blog

All blogs

All blogs

4 Dec 2013

The New Pioneers Case of the Month: Peepoople – Taking the Backdoor to Sanitation

Just imagine for a moment that you don’t have a toilet. Scary, isn’t it? This the reality for over 2.6 billion people on the planet, who lack access to even the simplest latrine. Not only would this make your life a lot more inconvenient, but also more dangerous.

Every 20th second, a child dies due to contaminated water from human excreta, and up to 50% of all deaths in emergency, refugee and IDP camp situations are caused by diarrhoeal diseases, such as cholera.

This is undoubtedly a huge problem, and on first sight it seems an insurmountable one as well. How are we supposed to install toilets in all slums and refugee camps when most of them do not even have sewage systems? The answer is… we don’t!

Peepoople is a Swedish company that addresses one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals: to halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to drinking water and sanitation by 2015. Its contribution is the single-use, biodegradable and self-sanitising Peepoo plastic bag which serves as a personal, portable and low-cost latrine.

The bag is lined with a coating that disinfects the waste, it is odour-free for at least 24 hours and within two to four weeks after use the bag content constitutes high-quality fertilizer – a usually expensive and scarce commodity in developing countries. The fertilized Peepoo bags turn contaminants into a local resource which improves the soil’s structure and water-holding capacity and which, in the long term, will improve the potential harvest from the fields and enable simple economic systems to develop.

So, in one package Peepoople manages to provide not only an environmentally friendly solution to a public health problem, but an environmentally beneficial one as well. This is a great example of bottom-up innovation that starts with the “consumer” of the product and the specific situation they are in. Peepoo is employing simple and accessible technology to solve a problem that has been around as long as people have been pooping, and they are doing so affordably and with an easy-to-use product.

It must make us wonder what other solutions to global challenges there are just waiting to be discovered. Perhaps you have one right in front of you?

_____________________________________________________________________________

The New Pioneers are this century’s generation of new leaders, social entrepreneurs, and social innovators that are turning TheNewPioneersBookPhoto_TaniaEllisglobal challenges into new business opportunities and sustainable ways of creating value.

Our Case of the Month features New Pioneers that are creating new hybrids of doing business and solving society’s problems. They are showing old world companies and organizations how to tackle new world challenges for the benefit of both humanity and the bottom-line.

Want to learn more about The New Pioneers? Read excerpts or buy Tania Ellis’ internationally recognized book at www.thenewpioneeers.biz

Posted in | All blogs | Business models & strategies | Case of the month | Social Entrepreneurship | Social innovations | The New Pioneers Case of the Month

Post a comment

And join the conversation

Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Tania Ellis    |    The Social Business Company
  • T: +45 3214 2295
  • M: +45 2625 2295
  • E-mail: te[at]taniaellis[dot]com
  • www.taniaellis.com
  • About|
  • Press|
  • Contact|
  • Newsletters|
  • Terms & Conditions|
  • Sitemap|
CO2 neutral hjemmeside