Global Connections: Another Great Year at the APRU SCL Conference
Introduction
LeapFrog Design is dedicated to serving our customers here in the US (which you can read about in our recent Medium article series) but we also have strong partnerships around the world. One way we maintain those relations is with the Association of Pacific Rim Universities Sustainable Cities and Landscape (APRU SCL) Research Hub. This year’s annual APRU SCL Hub conference was held virtually in December and for the third year running LeapFrog Design was invited to participate in the Water and Wastewater working group — a cohort of researchers, entrepreneurs, and industry innovators transforming the way we protect our freshwater resources, and promoting human health and dignity.
The Association of Pacific Rim Universities
About APRU
The Association of Pacific Rim Universities is a network of leading universities linking the Americas, Asia, and Australasia with the goal of providing transformative knowledge and innovation for the Asia-Pacific region. The organization brings together thought leaders, researchers, and policy-makers to exchange ideas and collaborate on effective solutions to the challenges of the 21st century. The primary research areas of the association include natural hazards & disaster risk reduction, women in leadership, population aging, global health, sustainable cities, artificial intelligence & the future of work, the Pacific Ocean, and labor mobility.
About APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes
The APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscape Research Hub was created in response to increasing concerns about the sustainability of cities due to rapid urbanization and population growth worldwide. The Hub recognizes that urban sustainability and global sustainability go hand-in-hand, and it is not possible to address global sustainability issues without understanding the interdependencies between cities and their surroundings.
The Hub also acknowledges that the current trend of rapid urbanization has major impacts on local environments, influencing landscapes at the peri-urban/rural transition through increasing air temperatures, shifting water cycles, and altering ecological processes.
The Hub aims to engage with cross-disciplinary experts, government officials, and external organizations to consider Asia Pacific cities in the context of their many landscape interdependencies. This includes examining services, networks, and systems within and beyond the urban periphery, comparing existing practices and models of city/landscape interactions across the region, and initiating solutions and policy interventions to make entire city-landscape metabolic processes more sustainable.
The University of Oregon, an international leader in sustainable urban design and landscape planning with its renowned Sustainable Cities Initiative and its Landscape Architecture and Planning, Public Policy and Management programs, hosts the APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Research Hub.
The Water and Wastewater Working Group
As part of the APRU SCL Research Hub, focused working groups have been formed to address specific challenges facing modern cities and the landscapes that support them. I was a founding member of the Water and Wastewater working group back in 2018, and in 2019 I led the group along with other LeapFrog team members Nicholas Sund and Dayna Hansberger. The working group has targeted issues facing the urban poor in what Doug Saunders has called the Arrival City — the peri-urban zone of growth typified by massive informal settlements often referred to as slums.
Water and wastewater management are particularly difficult in these territories given the extreme population density and absence of centralized water and sewer infrastructure. This year I was invited back to present to the working group on LeapFrog’s advancements over the past year. It was a particularly unique opportunity given the attendance of the Container-Based Sanitation Alliance — an international organization of container-based sanitation providers advancing safe sanitation for everyone, everywhere.
What is CBS and the CBSA?
Container-based sanitation (CBS) is a sanitation service that provides toilets to collect human excreta in sealable, removable containers on a regular basis and safely disposes of or reuses excreta. While some CBS service providers manage the entire sanitation service chain themselves, others partner with community groups to implement parts of the service model. Since toilet waste is not mixed with water from other household tasks (i.e. laundry), many providers take advantage of the nutrient-rich waste to convert the undiluted excreta into reuse products, such as biogas, solid fuel, compost, and animal feed.
Formed in November 2016, the Container-Based Sanitation Alliance (CBSA) is a coalition of CBS practitioners around the world with extensive experience in developing and providing innovative sanitation services. They are diligently working toward a world where access to dignified, safe and affordable sanitation is no longer out of reach for families and communities in dense urban areas. Their goal is to support greater quality and availability of CBS services. With the Water and Wastewater Working Group as the host, the CBSA brought together representatives from six CBS service providers at this years APRU SCL conference (CleanTeam, Sanivation, Sanergy, Soil, x-runner, and Mosan) to hear presentations, set research agendas, and learn more about new products, business models, and industry innovations. I was invited to present the innovative wastewater recycling systems LeapFrog is developing, our achievements over the past year, and the ways LeapFrog could partner with CBS providers as we move from product development to market pilots
LeapFrog and CBS
LeapFrog has been working with x-runner, a CBS provider in Lima, Peru, for the past three years. In fact, it was in the informal settlements of Lima that I was first presented with the challenge of untreated wastewater and the resulting muddy, pathogen rich, streets and stairways.
We’ve come a long way from those first prototypes and this year’s APRU SCL conference was the perfect opportunity to share with the other members of the CBSA the progress we have made and present some of the solutions we have developed. It was my goal to show the CSBA some of our latest R&D and inform CBS practitioners that by providing an affordable wastewater recycling system, LeapFrog Design can supplement CBS services with a wastewater management solution, further improving household and neighborhood hygiene, resource recovery, and a dignified way of life. I was also able to share our commercialization timeline and describe how CBS practitioners could help us along the way, specifically, with strategic market pilots and feedback on the performance of our products and how well they integrate with their current service models.
In addition to the information exchange, practitioners expressed a strong desire to integrate our products into their service and we are now in discussion to expand our field testing beyond Peru and the United States to other locations in the Asia Pacific region and around the world. The gathering was a great success with new insights gained, new partnerships kindled, and existing ones strengthened. Thanks, APRU SCL for inviting me back to this amazing conference, and thanks to the CBSA for the opportunity to share LeapFrog’s progress with you. We are humbled and excited to work with you all in the months and years to come!
