Megan Roux – DDRN https://ddrn.dk Danish Development Research Network Sun, 16 Jan 2022 18:37:47 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.7 https://ddrn.dk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/cropped-Logo-ddrn-footer-32x32.png Megan Roux – DDRN https://ddrn.dk 32 32 Upcoming research: Accountability – What makes people do the right thing all the time? https://ddrn.dk/7124/ Fri, 26 Feb 2021 15:30:32 +0000 https://ddrn.dk/?p=7124

There aren’t too many South Africans in Denmark, so any reminder of my country of birth is a source of comfort. When I heard Nadeem Salie’s voice through my laptop speakers during our Zoom call, it felt a little bit like being back home. Nadeem and I met virtually to discuss his work with the University of Copenhagen (UCPH), where he is currently a guest researcher in the Centre for Global Criminology at the Department of Anthropology. The aforementioned centre is a research organisation independent from policy or law enforcement agencies.

We immediately connected over our shared experience of being South African in academic institutions in Copenhagen. In 2015, Nadeem came to Copenhagen as a Visiting PhD Researcher, and spent seven months at UCPH’s Department of Anthropology. Nadeem returned to UCPH in December 2016 to complete his research. Nadeem was awarded his PhD in Law from the University of Cape Town in 2018 – his PhD thesis served to cast light on how ubuntu could be utilised to promote political accountability in public officials and forge social solidarity in South Africa. Ubuntu speaks to the interconnectedness of people and is often described as ‘I am because we are’. However, this is far removed from a nuanced understanding of ubuntu which seeks to advance the primacy of communal obligations (as opposed to individual wants and needs) as persuasively argued by the political philosopher Leonhard Praeg.

DDRN’s Arne Wangel wrote an article about Nadeem’s PhD, which you can read here.

Despite the fact that Nadeem and I work in entirely different fields, our common background allowed our conversation to depart from a platform of shared understanding of the South African political system and its present day challenges. Nadeem is focused at present on exploring accountability mechanisms and sustainability initiatives as a means to make a meaningful contribution in shaping a better working world. In this regard, the contrast between South Africa and Denmark is quite stark, which is why Denmark is of such interest to Nadeem.

As of 2020, Denmark and New Zealand are tied first place for being perceived as the least corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. South Africa ranks 69th.

Accountability is a complex concept – an anthropological perspective (as part of a multidisciplinary approach) is well suited to providing definitive insights into accountability and the promotion thereof. What makes people do the right thing all of the time?  Nadeem notes that Denmark’s extraordinary social welfare system is underpinned by an enlightened understanding of social solidarity which is routinely described as “we are all in the same boat”. This is key to ensuring that there is ongoing societal buy-in for a social welfare system which is supported in essence by all political parties. The welfare system provides more than a safety net – it provides a platform for people to realise their professional ambitions through free education.

Nadeem’s experience with Danish academic institutions dovetails neatly with his views of the welfare system. He tells me that his work at the University of Copenhagen has been an overwhelmingly positive experience in light of the collaborative and supportive approach of his professors. His professors have routinely doubled as his mentors and their generosity in sharing information (as well as their unwavering focus on knowledge production) has been nothing short of remarkable. Nadeem is working closely with Henrik Vigh (the current head of the Centre for Global Criminology) and Susan Whyte, both Professors at UCPH’s Department of Anthropology, and Inger Sjørslev, a retired Emeritus Professor from the same department, who was Nadeem’s primary mentor during his first visit to Denmark in 2015.

Nadeem is keen to expand on his exploration of the pliability of public officials during his time as a guest researcher at the University of Copenhagen. At present, the project is at the information gathering stage, and the team will submit an application for research funding in due course.

Megan Roux is a Master student of Sustainable Biotechnology, Aalborg University Copenhagen.

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Nadeem Salie

]]> AfricaLics (Part 1): South-North partnerships through the lens of AfricaLics https://ddrn.dk/7184/ Mon, 30 Nov 2020 16:12:38 +0000 https://ddrn.dk/?p=7184

This is the first of two articles about the organisation Africa Lics (an acronym for African Network for Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence Building Systems), which is part of the larger network Globelics. Founded in 2012, the AfricaLics aims to connect scholars, researchers and policy analysts in innovation and development studies in Africa.

To learn more about the organisation, I spoke to member of the AfricaLics secretariat and Academic Coordinator of the AfricaLics Visiting Fellowship Programme (VFP), Dr Margrethe Holm Andersen. Margrethe holds a Master in Public Administration and a PhD in Social Science. Prior to joining AfricaLics, she had been working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for about fifteen years.

The focus of AfricaLics (and Globelics) is on research in how innovation takes place and in innovation systems rather than on inventions and their commercialisation. Margrethe makes the point that “there’s a big difference between research on innovation and innovation processes, and research in innovation. And it’s the first part of it that AfricaLics is striving to promote. Why? The reason really is that an invention is not an innovation until it gets used…. that’s what makes and breaks it for a society,” she says. “You can have good researchers that develop fine ideas, but if you don’t get the ideas into use, you’re not going to solve your society’s problems. So that’s where the research on innovation and innovative processes is really important.” Researchers in the network provide evidence that (a) helps inventors and innovators ensure that their new or improved products, processes or ways of working are inclusive (i.e. benefit and reach those that need them most), and (b) supports the development of enabling environments within the innovating firm or organisation and/or the wider policy, regulatory or market settings.

In 2013, Margrethe joined the Globelics secretariat “with the specific focus on helping to establish AfricaLics” alongside the AfricaLics Secretary General Anna Kingiri, Innovation Specialist Rebecca Hanlin, and Bitrina Diyamett, who was the first Chair of the AfricaLics Scientific Board. Anna and Bitrina had worked together with Bengt-Aake Lundvall and Rasmus Lema from Aalborg University in putting together a funding proposal to the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) to help support the development of AfricaLics. When Sida granted the funds, Margrethe and fellow secretariat member Rebecca Hanlin were recruited to help establish the regional network. Margrethe tells me that “the focus on learning, innovation and competence building systems really complements what I had been doing.”

Developing AfricaLics procedures and ways of doing things was initially helped by the fact that “Globelics had many established practices, for example PhD academies and Globelics conferences…” Margrethe tells me. However, various components of AfricaLics are unique to the regional network. This includes primarily the Visiting Fellowship Programme (or VFP as it is known), but also other features such as the development of an academic coursework module on Innovation and Development aimed at Master students at African universities, as well as a training course on this module targeting a range of lecturers. “The synergy between the academy, conferences, and VFP, and the new mentoring programme we are trying to set up is really crucial for the research capacity building model that we have developed with time” Margrethe says.

The AfricaLics PhD VFP allows PhD students in innovation and development studies to attend a semester (five months) at the Department of Political Science at Aalborg University. The idea is that the scholars work on their research while at Aalborg University, and receive academic support. Since its inception, AfricaLics has hosted 18 visiting Fellows, and at the end of this phase, the organisation will have hosted a further 7 Fellows, making it 25 in total. Margrethe tells me that the PhD VFP “helps build the community enormously, because [the Fellows] get a deeper interaction with peers and Innovation and Development scholars”. During the five month stay, the Fellows’ supervisors get a chance to visit their students in Denmark, which Margrethe says is “a necessary part of the programme and something that makes it a bit different”.

In addition to the academic support, the Visiting Fellows receive support from a ‘buddy’ who helps with any non-academic questions they might have. In the past years, the groups have taken trips around Denmark, and even to Sweden and Norway. “The group aspect is crucial. If the group mentality is there and they support each other, the students get wonderful experiences and may establish long-lasting professional and personal links to each other and to the AfricaLics network”.

The impact of AfricaLics has extended beyond just the members and their research. Some universities in Africa have, as a result, implemented new Master’s courses on innovation and development studies. Margrethe mentions that “at [The University of Witwatersrand in South Africa], they already were running a programme mirroring the MIKE programme at Aalborg University, which is on innovation, knowledge development and economics”. Today, courses have also been established in Kenya, and in Dar es Salaam. Another larger impact is the establishment of NigeraLics, which is hosted by Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria and promotes collaboration and interaction between scholars and students with an interest in Innovation and Development from different universities in Nigeria.

I asked Margrethe if she could think of any specific benefits of South-North partnerships and capacity building, both for the South and the North. From a Southern perspective, and for the Visiting Fellows, she highlights that “the exposure, and the exchange of ideas” as well as the opportunity to start “challenging the way things are done at African universities” are two key things that come out of the VFP.

But there are also benefits for Denmark, and for the North. “Interaction with scholars is really something that gives you food for thought because you get to see something from a different perspective,” Margrethe says. “To me that has always been a good thing about being in interactions with researchers and people from different parts of the world, because it makes you think; it provokes you to see things from a different perspective and may also challenge the way you conceptualise things.” One of these new perspectives is that “you start valuing the informal relations and the informal sector issues much more”. Another point she draws out is that these collaborative partnerships can and do lead to world-changing innovation, like mobile money, which came out of Kenya (and was developed in collaboration with partners from the UK). The third and final key point Margrethe mentions is “the provisional networks and access to collaborative partners”.

AfricaLics is nearing the end of its second phase of support from the research department under Sida, and in the future aims to start “localising the research capacity building model so that it is increasingly fosters student exchange between African hubs.” This does not prohibit collaboration with universities outside Africa, and there are plans to try to involve more universities in the programme (for example from Sweden). In any case, future plans for the network include “making sure there’s sustainability around the network… the institutionalisation of the network is a big thing and not concluded yet”. Margrethe adds that the seventeen academic scholars – most of whom are from African countries – who form the AfricaLics Scientific Board in collaboration with alumni from the PhD academies and the VFP will be key actors in taking the network forward.

Megan Roux is a Master student of Sustainable Biotechnology, Aalborg University Copenhagen.

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Margrethe Holm Andersen

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

]]> AfricaLics (Part 2): A first-hand account of the Visiting Fellowship Programme (VFP) experience https://ddrn.dk/7178/ Mon, 30 Nov 2020 16:08:58 +0000 https://ddrn.dk/?p=7178

This is the second of two articles about the organisation AfricaLics. In the first article, I speak with Dr Margrethe Holm Andersen about the organisation, its model, and her perspective of its impacts. You can read it here.  

AfricaLics (an acronym for African Network for Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence Building Systems) is the African regional network of the larger network Globelics. Founded in 2013, the network aims to connect scholars, researchers and policy analysists in innovation and development studies in Africa.

To get the perspective of a former participant of the AfricaLics Visiting Fellowship Programme (VFP), I spoke to Justina Onumah from the University of Ghana, where Justina is a PhD candidate. Justina has studied Agricultural Economics in her undergraduate and Master’s degrees, but switched to development studies for her PhD. She also works at the CSIR-Science and Technology Policy Research Institute (STEPRI) in Ghana.

Justina attended the AfricaLics Visiting Fellowship Programme in 2018. She tells me that it was her third international academic exchange – the first having been in Guelph in Canada, and the second in Bonn, Germany. In 2018, at the time of the AfricaLics VFP, Justina was in the beginning of the second year of her PhD. During this time, PhD students at the University of Ghana take a semester of ‘experiential learning’, where students are placed in an industry or with a faculty member, and work on a project. Justina took this time to attend the AfricaLics VFP, where she was afforded an experiential learning experience, but with the focus on working on her PhD.

By the end of her time at Aalborg University, Justina had finished a draft of the first three chapters of her PhD thesis. “I’m grateful for the experience,” she tells me. “Aalborg pushed me ahead.”

Justina tells me that the programme actually ended up shaping her whole PhD topic. In 2016, the institute that Justina works at, CSIR-STEPRI, hosted an innovation conference, where AfricaLics secretariat member, Dr Margrethe Holm Andersen, came to speak about the organisation and about the VFP. “That was where my deep interest in innovation studies began,” Justina says. As a result of the presentation made about AfricaLics at the conference, Justina switched the focus of her PhD topic to one within innovation studies, with the support and encouragement of her lead supervisor.

As an international student myself, I was curious to hear about Justina’s impressions of Denmark and the Danish academic culture. She tells me that one of the biggest differences was the student-professor relationship. “There is more of an open door policy in Denmark,” she says.  “You can share the same space and eat together with your professors because PhD candidates are seen as faculty members in Denmark but you don’t get that much here [in Ghana]”. Though she indicated that she has been fortunate with the kind of supervisors she has, with their openness to using different platforms (even WhatsApp) for supervision, these open approaches are not common to find. She also mentions that Aalborg University’s Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach was something new for her. Justina tells me that in one of the first or second seminars during her VFP, she presented her proposal and the feedback she received was that she should delve deeper into the problem before writing about methodology and at that stage, they did not expect a lot on methodology. But in Ghana, she tells me that “we place a lot of emphasis on measurement and methods”.

The most beneficial aspect of the academic support that Justina received was “the intentional support and mentorship”. She tells me that “you have your timetable and you know you need to meet your mentor at this time, you need to present a portion of your work at this time,” whereas in her home university, these unofficial schedules may not be followed religiously and so the student will have to be sure to drive the process.  Justina took this learning experience back to Ghana too. “When I came back to Ghana, I was the graduate representative for our department, so I organised a seminar like that where, even amongst us… we could give peer-to-peer input”. This was acknowledged by the department and plans have been underway to add it to the already existing official seminars. This will not be examinable but will provide a platform for students to keep on track and receive inputs from peers and faculty members.

Overall, Justina says that the VFP experience was extremely positive. Not only did it help with her PhD, but it helped her in other ways. “With all these interactions, it builds up your confidence… it builds up your personal relationship skills [too]. You interact with people inside and outside of the department, and even within the department people are different… you learn how to interact with different people. And it broadens your network”. The network of Fellows continues today, she tells me: “we have a platform that we constantly engage on, so if there are opportunities we see, we’ll share them”. When I asked if there is anything Justina thinks the programme could do better, she is hard-pressed to come up with anything, but after some thought says that “there is not much support in terms of going for conferences whilst you are there, maybe it is because of the short period we are there for” and that the flexibility and funding for presenting at a conference could be considered for future VFPs.

She tells me that in the programme, “there’s no time lost. It’s focused on your thesis and that’s the most important thing. If you are serious, you come out with so much in that short space of time”.

To gain insight into the value of UN Sustainable Development Goal 17 (partnerships), I asked both Margrethe Andersen and Justina what they think the benefits of South-North collaboration are, both for the South and the North. You can read Margrethe’s answers in my previous article, but both Margrethe and Justina mention that a shift in perspective is one of the biggest benefits. “Sometimes if you don’t interact with different contexts, you might be narrow-minded… it opens up your perspective,” Justina tells me.

Megan Roux is a Master student of Sustainable Biotechnology, Aalborg University Copenhagen.

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Justina Onumah

 

]]> No such thing as waste: resource recovery and shifting perceptions https://ddrn.dk/3572/ Sat, 31 Oct 2020 20:48:46 +0000 https://ddrn.dk/?p=3572 ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is a well-known expression, but one with pernicious effects in the context of waste. We’ve always done things a certain way. Things are made, used, and thrown away. But where do all these thrown-away things go? What do they become? What could they become? Our linear way of thinking and behaving is being increasingly criticised as landfills overflow, water supplies dry up, and air becomes unbreathable.

Consider nature; a fecund system that has evolved over billions of years and where nothing is ever wasted, but rather reused for the growth of something else. It’s this line of thought that piques my interest in the work of Dr Dyllon Randall, an associate professor in the University of Cape Town’s Civil Engineering Department. Dyllon works with resource recovery from a specific waste stream: human urine. (Once you get over the ‘yuck’ factor, urine can be seen as a pretty useful substance.)

After completing his PhD in Chemical Engineering, where he focused on treating mining wastewater using crystallisation and precipitation technology, Dyllon went to Switzerland for two years. There, he worked on the ‘reinvent the toilet’ challenge funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2017 he moved back to South Africa to take up a position in UCT’s Civil Engineering Department. At first, Dyllon tells me, his research was broad and more focused on water quality, but what Dyllon is working on now is a “toolbox of technologies” for urine treatment.

The fertiliser-producing urinal

One of the technologies in this ‘toolbox’ is a waterless urinal that produces fertiliser. On his return to South Africa in 2017, Dyllon was met with the Cape Town water crisis. He tells me that for his work, this was a kind of “blessing in disguise”. He elaborates to say that it “forced us to produce this waterless, fertiliser-producing urinal. I don’t think we would have produced something like that if it wasn’t for the drought”.

The technology is almost shockingly simple. Urine contains the nitrogen compound urea, which is broken down by the enzyme urease to produce carbonate ions and ammonium ions. Over time, and depending on the pH of the urine, ammonium is lost as ammonia gas, which is the icky smell you get if urine sits for too long. However, if you treat the urine with calcium hydroxide, the pH of the urine is increased which kills the bacteria that produce urease, and so the urea stays in solution. Stabilising urine this way means two things: 1) when you add calcium hydroxide to urine, you precipitate out calcium phosphate, which is an inorganic fertiliser, and 2) preventing the degradation of urea into ammonium means you don’t have that unflushed-urinal stench and it gives you the opportunity to recover all the nitrogen from the urine.

“In the urinal you have calcium hydroxide, and within 30 seconds of someone peeing into that urinal you have calcium phosphate, which is a fertiliser,” Dyllon tells me. So here is a simple, in situ means of collecting and recovering the resources in urine. One iteration of the design has been implemented into the Growthpoint Properties’ Exxaro Headquarters in Gauteng, which is “the first commercial building in South Africa with a urine diversion and collection system,” says Dyllon. The building implemented a dual piping system, so that the urine is diverted from the sewer line and is instead collected in the basement and used as a liquid fertiliser on nearby sports fields.

Things become a bit trickier when trying to implement the system into existing buildings, because the cost associated with retrofitting is prohibitive. However, Dyllon has a vision of how these urinals can be easily incorporated into our daily lives.  Because the urinals don’t need to be connected to any existing sewer line, “all you would have to do is remove the existing urinals and put in a standalone entity: the fertiliser-producing urinals,” he tells me. Once collected, the urine can be transported for treatment, or just treated on-site (the latter of which is ideal, considering that urine is 95% water). “If you concentrate it on site, and you just transport the 5% where all the value is, you’ve substantially reduced your cost of transport. And so one of the ways we’re looking at is to use reverse osmosis to concentrate the urine”.

The bio-brick

Another instrument in Dyllon’s toolbox is the technology to make a brick from human urine. Dyllon had read about making biomaterials using technology called microbial induced carbonate precipitation (MICP). In this process, urease-producing bacteria are fed urea, and the urea is broken down into carbonate ions and ammonium ions. The carbonate ions can react with free calcium ions in solution to form calcium carbonate, which acts as a kind of cement that “essentially glues any loose material together, and you can use it to make any shape you want.” Dyllon tells me, “because I was working with urine I thought, why use [synthetic] urea when you could use urine?”

They first tested the feasibility of the technology by growing bio-columns. Like all research, the first attempts at making this kind of biomaterial were frustrating, and the bio-columns kept crumbling. The columns simply weren’t solidifying in all areas. After a few tests, Dyllon and his Master’s student, Jules Henze, realised that the technique they were using (pumping the bacteria and urine through a sand column) led to preferential flow and an uneven colonisation of the sand. So they switched techniques (first allowing the bacteria to homogeneously colonise the sand, then adding the urine) and were able to make a solid bio-column made from sand and human urine – the first of its kind.

The bio-brick has been through stages of development. Initial iterations only had a strength of 0.9 MPa (for context – face brick has a strength of about 14.5 MPa). This was then improved to 2.7 MPa by using a mixture of 50% sand and 50% Greywacke (a gravel-like substance). A while later, two Master’s students, Daniel de Oliveira and Kelly Fahn, co-supervised by Dyllon and Dr Rob Huddy, managed to even further increase the strength to 16 MPa by using pure urea. Because of this, Dyllon tells me that “as part of this toolbox approach, we are developing methods to extract the urea from the urine. So if we get that right then we could use it as a fertiliser or to make stronger bio-bricks”.

 “We are also interested in using plastic pellets as an aggregate for our bio-brick because all we need is an aggregate, and then we essentially glue it together using the bio-cement. And we can use any waste material… we could use glass, we could use plastic, we could use building rubble, we could use mine tailings. I mean, it’s just endless…”

A shift in social acceptability

Initially, Dyllon and his team found it difficult to collect enough urine to perform these experiments; “when we first developed the urinal it would take 4-5 days to fill a 25 litre container of urine… people weren’t really interested in it”. But as the bio-brick and urinal experiments became successful, which included some media coverage, it began taking only 6-8 hours to fill that same sized container. “We had people coming from other buildings, from different departments, to pee in the urinal because they thought it was going to go into making the next bio-brick… slowly but surely, students started getting more interested in this… it’s almost an exponential increase of interest.”

Dyllon tells me that for him “that’s the most fantastic thing. It shows the power of education. When you can share that bit of knowledge to a broad audience, you get people interested in that topic, but you also get to change their mind-set… now they’re thinking about urine differently, and what else are they going to think about differently?”. The next steps for Dyllon’s urine-related work include testing the next version of the urinal and commercialising it, which would allow them to collect large quantities of urine. The team also wants to further develop the other processes; concentrating urine using reverse osmosis for high-grade liquid fertiliser production, recovering the urea, and optimising the bio-brick process.

 ‘Waste’ or ‘resource’?

Dyllon’s work has been featured rather widely, leading him to release a comprehensive video of the technology and research. The precursor for all of this innovation is Dyllon recognising the value of a single waste stream. What he has realised, and what we all need to realise, is that there must be a paradigm shift – from one where we consider certain things as ‘waste’, to one where we see those same things as ‘resources’.  “Nature knows no waste. [In] nature, when you’re producing a ‘waste’, [it’s] just getting reused somewhere else in another form and another product,” Dyllon says. The idea isn’t necessarily novel (consider the book ‘Cradle to Cradle’), but it is something we need to be constantly reminded of until it becomes woven into our way of thinking and designing. “We’ve become so accustomed to our way of life that we’re comfortable… and I’ll use sanitation as an example. We flush away our waste every day, rather than having to deal with it,” Dyllon tells me. “You and I are producing urea every day, and we’re literally flushing it away rather than recovering it.” With resources diminishing, we have to start thinking about our processes differently. We have to realise that there is no such thing as ‘waste’. 

“I ask myself this question: ‘what else can I make from urine?’ Just that simple question. And then this has led to all these other processes, and that’s just from urine. Now imagine you did the same thing with general wastewater, or greywater, or plastics?”

Megan Roux is a Master student of Sustainable Biotechnology, Aalborg University Copenhagen.

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]]> No such thing as waste: resource recovery and shifting perceptions https://ddrn.dk/7215/ Sat, 31 Oct 2020 17:02:58 +0000 https://ddrn.dk/?p=7215

‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is a well-known expression, but one with pernicious effects in the context of waste. We’ve always done things a certain way. Things are made, used, and thrown away. But where do all these thrown-away things go? What do they become? What could they become? Our linear way of thinking and behaving is being increasingly criticised as landfills overflow, water supplies dry up, and air becomes unbreathable.

Consider nature; a fecund system that has evolved over billions of years and where nothing is ever wasted, but rather reused for the growth of something else. It’s this line of thought that piques my interest in the work of Dr Dyllon Randall, an associate professor in the University of Cape Town’s Civil Engineering Department. Dyllon works with resource recovery from a specific waste stream: human urine. (Once you get over the ‘yuck’ factor, urine can be seen as a pretty useful substance.)

After completing his PhD in Chemical Engineering, where he focused on treating mining wastewater using crystallisation and precipitation technology, Dyllon went to Switzerland for two years. There, he worked on the ‘reinvent the toilet’ challenge funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2017 he moved back to South Africa to take up a position in UCT’s Civil Engineering Department. At first, Dyllon tells me, his research was broad and more focused on water quality, but what Dyllon is working on now is a “toolbox of technologies” for urine treatment.

The fertiliser-producing urinal

One of the technologies in this ‘toolbox’ is a waterless urinal that produces fertiliser. On his return to South Africa in 2017, Dyllon was met with the Cape Town water crisis. He tells me that for his work, this was a kind of “blessing in disguise”. He elaborates to say that it “forced us to produce this waterless, fertiliser-producing urinal. I don’t think we would have produced something like that if it wasn’t for the drought”.

The technology is almost shockingly simple. Urine contains the nitrogen compound urea, which is broken down by the enzyme urease to produce carbonate ions and ammonium ions. Over time, and depending on the pH of the urine, ammonium is lost as ammonia gas, which is the icky smell you get if urine sits for too long. However, if you treat the urine with calcium hydroxide, the pH of the urine is increased which kills the bacteria that produce urease, and so the urea stays in solution. Stabilising urine this way means two things: 1) when you add calcium hydroxide to urine, you precipitate out calcium phosphate, which is an inorganic fertiliser, and 2) preventing the degradation of urea into ammonium means you don’t have that unflushed-urinal stench and it gives you the opportunity to recover all the nitrogen from the urine.

“In the urinal you have calcium hydroxide, and within 30 seconds of someone peeing into that urinal you have calcium phosphate, which is a fertiliser,” Dyllon tells me. So here is a simple, in situ means of collecting and recovering the resources in urine. One iteration of the design has been implemented into the Growthpoint Properties’ Exxaro Headquarters in Gauteng, which is “the first commercial building in South Africa with a urine diversion and collection system,” says Dyllon. The building implemented a dual piping system, so that the urine is diverted from the sewer line and is instead collected in the basement and used as a liquid fertiliser on nearby sports fields.

Things become a bit trickier when trying to implement the system into existing buildings, because the cost associated with retrofitting is prohibitive. However, Dyllon has a vision of how these urinals can be easily incorporated into our daily lives.  Because the urinals don’t need to be connected to any existing sewer line, “all you would have to do is remove the existing urinals and put in a standalone entity: the fertiliser-producing urinals,” he tells me. Once collected, the urine can be transported for treatment, or just treated on-site (the latter of which is ideal, considering that urine is 95% water). “If you concentrate it on site, and you just transport the 5% where all the value is, you’ve substantially reduced your cost of transport. And so one of the ways we’re looking at is to use reverse osmosis to concentrate the urine”.

The bio-brick

Another instrument in Dyllon’s toolbox is the technology to make a brick from human urine. Dyllon had read about making biomaterials using technology called microbial induced carbonate precipitation (MICP). In this process, urease-producing bacteria are fed urea, and the urea is broken down into carbonate ions and ammonium ions. The carbonate ions can react with free calcium ions in solution to form calcium carbonate, which acts as a kind of cement that “essentially glues any loose material together, and you can use it to make any shape you want.” Dyllon tells me, “because I was working with urine I thought, why use [synthetic] urea when you could use urine?”

They first tested the feasibility of the technology by growing bio-columns. Like all research, the first attempts at making this kind of biomaterial were frustrating, and the bio-columns kept crumbling. The columns simply weren’t solidifying in all areas. After a few tests, Dyllon and his Master’s student, Jules Henze, realised that the technique they were using (pumping the bacteria and urine through a sand column) led to preferential flow and an uneven colonisation of the sand. So they switched techniques (first allowing the bacteria to homogeneously colonise the sand, then adding the urine) and were able to make a solid bio-column made from sand and human urine – the first of its kind.

The bio-brick has been through stages of development. Initial iterations only had a strength of 0.9 MPa (for context – face brick has a strength of about 14.5 MPa). This was then improved to 2.7 MPa by using a mixture of 50% sand and 50% Greywacke (a gravel-like substance). A while later, two Master’s students, Daniel de Oliveira and Kelly Fahn, co-supervised by Dyllon and Dr Rob Huddy, managed to even further increase the strength to 16 MPa by using pure urea. Because of this, Dyllon tells me that “as part of this toolbox approach, we are developing methods to extract the urea from the urine. So if we get that right then we could use it as a fertiliser or to make stronger bio-bricks”.

 “We are also interested in using plastic pellets as an aggregate for our bio-brick because all we need is an aggregate, and then we essentially glue it together using the bio-cement. And we can use any waste material… we could use glass, we could use plastic, we could use building rubble, we could use mine tailings. I mean, it’s just endless…”

A shift in social acceptability

Initially, Dyllon and his team found it difficult to collect enough urine to perform these experiments; “when we first developed the urinal it would take 4-5 days to fill a 25 litre container of urine… people weren’t really interested in it”. But as the bio-brick and urinal experiments became successful, which included some media coverage, it began taking only 6-8 hours to fill that same sized container. “We had people coming from other buildings, from different departments, to pee in the urinal because they thought it was going to go into making the next bio-brick… slowly but surely, students started getting more interested in this… it’s almost an exponential increase of interest.”

Dyllon tells me that for him “that’s the most fantastic thing. It shows the power of education. When you can share that bit of knowledge to a broad audience, you get people interested in that topic, but you also get to change their mind-set… now they’re thinking about urine differently, and what else are they going to think about differently?”. The next steps for Dyllon’s urine-related work include testing the next version of the urinal and commercialising it, which would allow them to collect large quantities of urine. The team also wants to further develop the other processes; concentrating urine using reverse osmosis for high-grade liquid fertiliser production, recovering the urea, and optimising the bio-brick process.

 ‘Waste’ or ‘resource’?

Dyllon’s work has been featured rather widely, leading him to release a comprehensive video of the technology and research. The precursor for all of this innovation is Dyllon recognising the value of a single waste stream. What he has realised, and what we all need to realise, is that there must be a paradigm shift – from one where we consider certain things as ‘waste’, to one where we see those same things as ‘resources’.  “Nature knows no waste. [In] nature, when you’re producing a ‘waste’, [it’s] just getting reused somewhere else in another form and another product,” Dyllon says. The idea isn’t necessarily novel (consider the book ‘Cradle to Cradle’), but it is something we need to be constantly reminded of until it becomes woven into our way of thinking and designing. “We’ve become so accustomed to our way of life that we’re comfortable… and I’ll use sanitation as an example. We flush away our waste every day, rather than having to deal with it,” Dyllon tells me. “You and I are producing urea every day, and we’re literally flushing it away rather than recovering it.” With resources diminishing, we have to start thinking about our processes differently. We have to realise that there is no such thing as ‘waste’. 

“I ask myself this question: ‘what else can I make from urine?’ Just that simple question. And then this has led to all these other processes, and that’s just from urine. Now imagine you did the same thing with general wastewater, or greywater, or plastics?”

Megan Roux is a Master student of Sustainable Biotechnology, Aalborg University Copenhagen.

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Dyllon Randall                                     Photo: Robyn Walker

Photo: Candice Lowin

Photo: Candice Lowin

GROWING BIO-BRICKS FROM URINE

]]> Circular economy: Breaking the plastic waves https://ddrn.dk/7159/ Thu, 29 Oct 2020 15:55:02 +0000 https://ddrn.dk/?p=7159

This article pertains to my ongoing MSc thesis in Sustainable Biotechnology, in which I am examining the role of bio-based plastics in the transition to a circular economy in Denmark. I am due to complete my Master’s in June 2021. In this article, I’ll be discussing the problem that I am examining in my thesis, as I am still gathering results.

You’ve heard it all before: the state of our plastic waste crisis is dire. And it’s true. Around 13 million tonnes of plastic leaks into the ocean annually, and this is just expected to increase unless we act now1. Of all of the plastic waste generated, the majority is plastic packaging, and constitutes 60% of the coastal waste2. So packaging is an interest focus area. When we zoom in on this fraction of plastic waste, it’s usually made up of polypropylene (PP), polyethylene (PE) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). PET is one of the most widely used plastics, and also one of the most consumed. We use PET to make plastic bottles, and worldwide we consume about one million bottles every minute.

Linear and circular economies

One problem contributing to the plastic waste crisis is the way that we use things, which is in a very linear fashion. We take natural resources from the ground, we make a product, then we buy and use it, and then when we think we’re done with it, we just throw it away and never think about it again. But what happens to our waste? Well, in Denmark, we burn most of it for energy. When it comes to plastic, even though there are technology opportunities for the recycling of plastics, the traceability of this is quite low, and it’s still estimated that more than half of our plastics are incinerated2. While incineration is better than landfilling, it still results in a high amount of CO2 emissions, and it is the lowest value recovery option of plastics. Burning our waste and our linear systems results in a huge loss of potential. It is estimated that by not recycling plastics and having to import virgin plastic into Denmark, the country loses DKK 1.6 billion each year2.

A different way of producing and consuming that is becoming increasingly popular is the concept of a circular economy. In an ideal circular economy, there is no real waste – things are designed to be used forever, and whatever isn’t used in one process for one product, may be used in another. We see this in nature, which is a system that has evolved over billions of years to sustain itself. In the circular economy, instead of throwing our waste away, we return it to the producers and it is either reused or recycled. An example of a somewhat circular system is the Dansk Retursystem.

Both on an EU-level and a national level, there is a movement from a linear system to a circular one. But to achieve a truly circular plastics economy, using renewable feedstock for new material is key.

Bio-based plastics – what are they?

Bio-based plastics are considered to play an important role in the transition to a circular plastic economy because they allow us to reduce our dependency on non-renewable feedstocks. The accepted definition of bio-based plastics, sometimes interchangeably referred to as bioplastics, is a plastic material made from renewable biomass sources. There are many different kinds of these plastics. There are some which are biodegradable, like polylactic acid (PLA) or polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), but ‘bio-based’ does not necessarily mean ‘biodegradable’.

This confusion is quite dangerous because biodegradable plastic pollutes the plastic recycling stream, so we don’t want people throwing biodegradables away with recyclables. And ‘biodegradable’ often means biodegradable only under certain conditions, like elevated temperatures, which many people might not know. Even with the technology in place, we need to make sure we manage these sustainable innovations so that we optimise their environmental benefits.

Currently, bio-based plastics aren’t that big and represent only about 1% of the plastics market. However, there is investment by the European Commission, in a joint project with Bio-Based Industries (BBI), of 3.7 billion Euros to increase the production of bio-based raw materials. So bio-based plastics are soon become more present on the market – but is Denmark ready for them?

Working together to create change

We need to look both at the production of these plastics, as well as how they are handled, if we want to transition to a circular economy. Which is why my thesis topic is attempting to look at both of these aspects. Over the past few months, I have been conducting interviews with different stakeholders – people in policymaking, the plastic industry, waste management, and non-governmental organisations – about system-level strategies for bio-based plastic, in order to assess the readiness level of Denmark for the emergence of this material. Next, I’ll be conduct a citizen survey to better understand consumers’ perception of bio-based plastic. I’ll also be examining the production of a specific bio-based plastic that is an alternative to the widely used polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The intention behind this project is to contribute to the transition to a more circular economy in Denmark, and I’ll be sharing the results of the project in a few months’ time.

References 

1. The PEW Charitable Trusts and SYSTEMIQ “Breaking the Plastic Wave” (2018) 

2. McKinsey & Company “New Plastics Economy: A research, innovation and business opportunity for Denmark” (2019)

Megan Roux is a Master student of Sustainable Biotechnology, Aalborg University Copenhagen.

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Megan RouxMegan Roux
]]> Multidisciplinary collaboration to secure the future of water in Cape Town https://ddrn.dk/3453/ Mon, 21 Sep 2020 10:58:53 +0000 https://ddrn.dk/?p=3453

Although written over fifty years ago, Frank Herbert’s great sci-fi novel Dune seems a prescient piece of literature about the necessity of learning to live with the Earth, not just on it. The inhabitants of Dune’s desert planet Arrakis have a certain reverence for water, and for the planet’s ecology, that we can all learn from. Reading Dune on the canals of Copenhagen on a sunny August day, it is hard to imagine the waterless world Herbert describes. However, a few years ago, as I was finishing my Bachelor’s degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, the threat of an urban drought was all too real.

In 2018, the City of Cape Town declared a city-wide water crisis, which would be punctuated by ‘Day Zero’ – the day the city would run out of water. The drought had been looming for years, and the City of Cape Town had made some management changes, but all rested on the assumption that rain would fall at the same rate as in the past. This proved to be a big mistake and a lesson for us all in the effects of climate change. As the threat of severe drought came closer, citizens were urged to use less water – at most 50 litres a day, which, at ‘Day Zero’ would be even further reduced to 25 litres a day and distributed to people via emergency water stations. In the beginning, we simply had to change our behaviour to fit the limits that the municipality imposed on us. But inevitably we became more conscious of the way we use water. Why do we take such long showers, and then not use any of that water again to flush the toilet, or to water the plants outside? 

We began to understand (and be frightened by) the prospect of running out of a substance essential to life. And like the characters in Dune, we became more aware of the value of this finite resource. In the end, Cape Town was relieved of the pressure of drought due to some much welcomed rain. I would like to think that the water crisis changed our understanding of the precariousness of our ecosystem, but I have the suspicion that it will take a lot more for a lasting change in water consumption behaviour.

To better understand the current Cape Town water situation, I spoke to Dr Kevin Winter, a professor at UCT’s Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences (EGS). Kevin became involved in water research after completing his PhD in water science and management. The “golden thread” of his career, as he puts it, “has always been about monitoring, about generating data, about trying to understand patterns and trends”. Kevin’s work has taken him into many different areas, as a result of the multidisciplinary nature of the EGS department. And it’s this cross-sector collaboration that he enjoys about the work.

“I believe the kinds of questions that we’re asking in water science at the moment could not come from engineers’ mouths alone any longer,” he tells me. “What you have to try and work at right now is changing behaviour, and 70-90% of our problems are how to deal with people in their social contexts. I think that’s why it’s quite important to be working in these transdisciplinary environments right now, because the questions are different.”

To try and solve the water management challenges in South Africa, Kevin helped set up Future Water: a water research organisation based at UCT. “We’ve got a core group of academics from health sciences, economics, and law, and humanities and sciences and engineering,” Kevin tells me. And he goes on to explain that there is more to it than just getting a group of people from different disciplines together:

“I think probably the most exciting thing for me is… where do you find your place in all of this? Even if you have [the] opportunity to set up an institute like that, you need to make sure you’ve got a project that begins to bring people’s minds together. So I think what I was looking for was ‘where do I find a site where I can bring different disciplines together?’ Which is how the whole Water Hub started in Franschhoek.”

The Water Hub

The Water Hub is a research and skills development centre as well as a recreation destination. The vision of the site is one where the conference centre, exhibition space and research labs are integrated with the surrounding nature. It is located at an abandoned wastewater treatment plant in Franschhoek, in the Western Cape province of South Africa. The plant was never fully decommissioned, and now serves as what Kevin calls an “urban living lab”. At the site, the focus is on the food-energy-water and waste nexus. “We don’t bring anything else in. We don’t add any more chemicals. We try to clean things the way nature would clean water,” Kevin tells me.

One of the projects at the Water Hub is a biofiltration system intended to biologically treat runoff water from an informal settlement and to make this water available for crop irrigation by the settlement. “What we’ve got really is a reconstructed wetland,” Kevin says. “We’ve taken the design from nature in that sense, and now we are learning what level and quantity and flow is required for the water to retain the anaerobic habitat with a diversity of microbes that are sitting quite deep down in these very large filters.”

Kevin describes the basic setup of the system, which comprises six parallel biofilter cells. Two are filled with large stones (one vegetated and one not), two filled with peach pips that serve as a carbon source for the microbes, and two with smaller stones. The polluted water, which contains among other contaminants Escherichia coli, high levels of ammonia and phosphate, as well as antiretroviral medication used to treat HIV, is passed through these filters and then tested. The water, which still contains some nutrients, is then used as a liquid fertiliser for crop irrigation. Having successfully grown some crops in permaculture gardens at the Water Hub, the next step is to “start rolling out larger gardens and making a food haven there,” which Kevin tells me “will involve 4 or 5 people from the informal settlement” to grow the food, thus involving the community in the project.  

So far, the filters have done well with the E. coli; removing almost all of it from the system, and with the nutrients; reducing ammonia and phosphate levels by 90-95%. The large rough stone (19-25 mm in diameter) filters have worked the best. Some of the problems that still remain are high levels of potassium and salt in the water. For these, the team is testing out the use of biochar filters and duckweed.

A current student at UCT, Rowyn Naidoo, took on the task of trying to incorporate biomimicry, or nature-inspired design, into this project. For one, the biofilter setup itself acts as a kind of ‘reconstructed wetland’; slowing down the water flow so that contaminants can settle, and microbes can act on the polluted stream and outcompete undesirable bacteria like E. coli. As a second nod to biomimicry, Rowyn looked to termite colonies for inspiration. Termite colonies are designed in mounds that promote air flow and soil mixing. This very design can be used in the crop irrigation system for more efficient water distribution.

The next steps for the Water Hub will be to track how much of the chemicals are making their way into the crops. Kevin tells me that current research estimates “about 90% of the chemicals are being trapped within these biofilters, either through bacteria, or actually as a particle, but they are being held within that process,” which is good news. Before anything can fully go forward, the Water Hub wants to get the research right. “Demonstrating a sustainable centre… and to get it to work is really important because that’s where inspiration comes from.”

 The Cape Town water situation today

Having not been in South Africa for over a year now, I was curious about the current water situation in Cape Town. Have people forgotten about being water-wise, and reverted back to old habits? Has the Covid-19 pandemic changed behaviour? Kevin’s response was positive; “for the moment, I think the behaviour is quite well sustained,” he says. However, the pandemic hasn’t made things easier. Kevin informs me that it has posed several challenges to water monitoring, as water meter officials cannot always go out and do their jobs. As a result, many households are given estimated water-use values, so they don’t really know what they’re using. This approach isn’t going to make people conscious of their water use, which is something Kevin thinks is essential to the future of water management.

Kevin says he’s “really interested [to see how] during Covid people have been behaving differently. And that data is really difficult to get at now because there’s a large majority of households that have just been given estimate values.” One of the future solutions Kevin and I touched on is the idea of using artificial intelligence to track water use. This is one among many projects that the City of Cape Town is looking into with regards to water management.

Looking to the future

In addition to ensuring citizen consciousness about water use, avoiding another water crisis comes down to diversifying water sources, reliable data tracking, and investigating water recirculation. As Kevin tells me, “we’ve got more than enough water that falls, we’ve just got to use it properly”. 

The characters in Dune wear suits that clean and recirculate water expelled from the body for drinking, and they only move around at night to avoid the sun’s dehydrating effects and save what precious water they have. These actions seem extreme, and they are, but if we don’t want to have to turn to extreme measures then perhaps we need a more urgent focus on the way we use water. A space like the Water Hub, where minds from different backgrounds can come together, seems like a good place to start.

Megan Roux is a Master student of Sustainable Biotechnology, Aalborg University Copenhagen.

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Kevin Winter

 

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