Beth Foster-Chao
Upcycling waste for good
Approximately 3.6 billion people around the world—nearly 780 million of whom live in the African continent—lack access to adequate sanitation services. Despite rapid population growth and urbanization, limited investment has been made to ensure adequate sanitation, leading to public health risks and environmental contamination.
The gap of investment in sanitation infrastructure is particularly evident in Ghana, one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, where more than half of residents now live in cities. Although waste management services are expanding, a sizable amount of fecal waste in Ghana’s two largest cities—Accra and Kumasi—is left untreated and ends up contaminating nearby land and water bodies.
The externalities of unmanaged waste
Inadequate waste management poses severe risks to public health and the environment. Open dumping, burning of waste, and insufficient treatment processes release pollutants and toxins into the air, causing respiratory and neurological diseases. Contamination from dumping waste into waterways can lead to infectious and vector-borne disease transmission.
When left untreated, decomposing organic waste in landfills also emits significant volumes of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2), exacerbating global warming and climate change. And methane produced by fecal waste in non-sewered sanitation systems such as pit latrines and septic systems contributes nearly 5% of manmade methane emissions globally.
The World Bank estimates that an investment of roughly $114 billion annually—around three times historic financing trends—will be needed to achieve the United Nations’ sixth sustainable development goal, to ensure access to water and sanitation for all by 2030. In the context of limited municipal budgets and low-income customer segments, new technologies or approaches that reduce the upfront capital expenditures and the costs of operating treatment and disposal facilities are critical for addressing the challenges of unmanaged waste, which will only worsen as cities in Africa continue to grow.
Why Safisana?
The Autodesk Foundation is pleased to welcome Safisana to our Health & Resilience portfolio. Safisana is a nonprofit committed to improving climate resilience and solving waste, sanitation, and energy-related issues in urban and peri-urban communities in Africa’s rapidly growing economies.
Safisana’s circular sanitation and waste management system focuses on the treatment and recycling of organic and fecal waste through recovery of valuable resources such as energy and nutrients, thus improving social, economic, and environmental living conditions of communities in low-income countries that face public health, climate, and food security challenges.
Safisana’s innovative recycling plant effectively treats organic and fecal waste and converts these waste streams, which would otherwise be dumped untreated, into valuable outputs: biogas, electricity, and organic fertilizer. Through its localized, circular solution for waste treatment, Safisana’s waste-to-value model allows the organization to cover operating costs while increasing its impact beyond waste management, to include improved agricultural productivity and renewable energy access.
By processing waste in a large-scale anaerobic digester, Safisana’s closed-loop system captures the methane from decomposition and converts it into biogas, which powers the facility and delivers electricity to the national grid. In the future, excess biogas will be sold to local food processing plants looking to decarbonize their operations.
“Recycling organic and fecal waste offers a huge opportunity to reduce CO2 emissions and limit global warming, especially in countries most affected by climate change,” says Aart van den Beukel, who founded Safisana in 2010. “The only way to meet the growing needs of future generations is to recover resources such as energy, water, and nutrients from waste and reuse them.”
Annually, Safisana’s waste collection team prevents more than 4,000 metric tons of organic waste from ending up in landfills and roughly 10,900 metric tons of fecal sludge from being dumped into the environment. The captured waste produces 685 mWh of grid power and 864,000 kilograms of organic fertilizer each year, which is sold to local farmers to improve crop health and yields. Safisana estimates these services positively impact at least 80,000 people annually.
In 2017, Safisana opened its first recycling plant in Ashaiman, located in Ghana’s Greater Accra Region—the first waste-to-energy plant in West Africa, which has since grown into a stable, locally managed operation. Safisana aims to maximize the impact of the facility by collaborating with food processing companies looking to meet ‘net-zero’ commitments by treating organic waste and transitioning to renewable energy. These industry partnerships will allow Safisana to increase the reach of its sanitation services and chart a path to financial sustainability for new recycling plants.
With its circular waste-to-resource approach well-poised for replication, Safisana is determined to build out a network of locally embedded recycling plants across the African continent. The nonprofit is currently exploring opportunities to work on co-location with existing wastewater utilities and developing systems with food processing companies.
Our collaboration
Safisana will leverage Autodesk resources, industry knowledge, talent, and networks to scale its operations and replicate its model in more locations. The organization is currently using Autodesk Construction Cloud to plan and manage new projects and will be using AutoCAD to design and build new recycling plants in the future.
“By working with the Autodesk Foundation, Safisana can replicate and scale its circular model to many more locations in low- and middle-income countries and ensure its sustainable socioeconomic and environmental impact on communities and the climate.”
— Aart van den Beukel, Founder & Managing Director, Safisana
Safisana has identified numerous business opportunities in Ghana and beyond that will further support its mission and scale its capacity. Capitalizing on these connections, Safisana hopes to extend its services and explore new markets and business opportunities in Uganda and Ethiopia. Ultimately, it aims to generate and sustain reliable sanitation infrastructure for the millions of people living in non-sewered urban areas worldwide.
Learn more about Safisana’s efforts to reduce waste, improve sanitation, and produce value at scale.