Sanergy, a company that focuses on building sustainable sanitation in urban slums contacted the Palmer Coking Coal Company and the two have teamed up to raise awareness about Sanergy’s products.

The partnership includes building a model toilet at Palmer in Black Diamond using the types of materials and simple constructions techniques that might be found in Kenya.

Sanergy provides a system where local entrepreneurs franchise Fresh Life toilets bringing hygienic, accessible and affordable sanitation to closely packed residents in the slums of Nairobi. Slum residents pay to use the toilets, typically about 5 cents per use, allowing the toilet owners to earn up to $1,000 per year, about three times the poverty rate.  New jobs are in turn created to manage and clean the toilets. Each day, Sanergy’s staff collects the waste bringing it back to their waste management facility. The waste is converted into organic fertilizer and biogas which is sold to commercial farms and the electric grid. Sanergy’s model was born of an idea to create a system that addressed the entire sanitation value chain: from the provision of basic hygienic conditions for the Fresh Life toilet user, to the safe collection and conversion of human waste into useful products. Over one hundred sanitation centers are now built and have served over one million customers.

Bill Kombol, manager of Palmer said that the opportunity arose when he received an e-mail whose subject line was “possibly the strangest request you’ve ever received”. The request came from his niece who is stationed in Nairobi and works for Sanergy. She told of a Seattle colleague’s inability to find a small piece of land to test-build a toilet.

“The usual third world model is to give money to governments who use it to buy tanks and build fancy palaces,” Kombol said. “Sanergy is changing people’s lives with improved sanitation through an entrepreneurial model utilizing the profit motive.”