Everyday Technology Power Estimations

Here are my very rough estimations for the power usage of some common technologies: a light, TV, computer, car, motorcycle, refrigerator, oven, and radio. I didn't use internet so these estimations must be taken with a grain of salt!
 

Sampurn(e)arth Reforming Waste Management in India

Indian cities generate a massive amount of waste, most of which is dumped onto the open ground. Mumbai alone produces more than 10,000 tons of waste per day. Besides being an environmental travesty, waste pickers scavenge through the debris, searching for useful materials that can be sold or repurposed.

Sampurn(e)arth, a social enterprise start-up, is working to change how waste is managed, or unmanaged, in Mumbai by sorting waste at its source and "decentralizing waste management." The company separates wet and dry waste, and then transforms the wet waste into cooking gas and organic fertilizer at a biogas plant. The dry waste is then recycled.

What I find most powerful about Sampurn(e)arth's project is that it has partnered with Stree Mukti Sanganatha (Women's Liberation Organization), which includes an organization of female waste pickers. These waste pickers are trained to sort the waste and operate the biogas and composting systems. The benefits to these women appear to be manyfold - the organization pays them a living wage, social insurance, safe working conditions, and a livelihood that is not only dignified and empowering, but also improves the urban environment.

To read more click here. Visit Sampurn(e)arth's website here.

I Survived the Water Challenge!

Today marks the end of my participation in the Water Challenge, a week-long experiment between Olin Affordable Entrepreneurship & Design students and Wellesley Engineering students. The challenge required that we obtain all drinking, cleaning, and washing water from locations outside of our residential buildings. For me, this meant that I was not allowed to use the toilet, take showers, wash laundry, or use any sink water for drinking or washing in the Sustainability Co-op (Scoop) where I live. While the challenge seemed daunting and unmanageable, I embraced it as an opportunity to gain some sense of how difficult it is for people in underserved communities to live without access to clean water in or near their homes.

These are the strategies I used throughout the challenge:

Toilet

In Scoop, we have a policy of "if it's yellow, let it mellow" that made it pretty easy for me to use the toilets where I live. If I needed to flush, I used a bucket of water to manually flush the toilet. I obtained all of my personal-use water from a hose outside of the Greenhouses and carried it back to Scoop in 5 gallon buckets. But for the most part, I took advantage of toilets in the Science Center, Sports Center, and wherever else I found myself throughout the day.

Shower

While I tried to minimize the number of times I showered during the week, I took a couple short bucket showers in Scoop with water from the Botanic Gardens. These showers were very cold!! It took practice to figure out how much water I needed to wash all of the soap out of my hair. Once I had to turn on the shower very briefly because I ran out of bucket water. Ultimately I was able to shower with less than 2.5 gallons of water.

Laundry

Unfortunately I direly needed to do laundry during the challenge, so I lugged my laundry to McAfee and used the washer there.

Drinking water

The water I obtained from the Botanic Gardens hose was not potable, so I kept my water bottle attached to my hip all week, and filled it up in various buildings on campus throughout the day. I used this water to brush my teeth.

Hand-washing

I kept two half gallon milk bottles of water in the Scoop bathroom for washing my hands. Not having access to the sink forced me to use less water and soap while washing so that I wouldn't have to go fetch more water as often.

Scoop Chores

Since I live in a cooperative, I am not on the meal plan and have to do chores for the co-op such as washing dishes and cooking. When I washed my personal dishes I used water that I kept in a bucket in the kitchen, or I put my dishes in the dishwasher (but didn't turn it on). When I had to wash up after Scoop dinner, I would use sink water to clean big pots and dishes, and I would turn on the dishwasher. When cooking for Scoop I also used filtered sink water because I didn't want to use non-potable water in anything that people would be consuming. I felt that my responsibility to the co-op warranted me breaking the water challenge rules for the well-being of my fellow Scoopies.

Reflection

This challenge was an incredibly value experience because it compelled me to be so much more intentional about my water consumption. There were so many times during the week that I reached to turn on the faucet and then had to check myself, because I have deeply ingrained habits derived from always having had access to running water. Throughout the week, I kept a detailed journal of every time I used water, where I used it, and how much I used because I wanted to actually see how much water I was consuming. Recording my water use caused me to use increasingly less water as I realized that some of my water use (as when I take a shower that's more than 5 minutes long) is really unnecessary and wasteful.

Having to venture outside of Scoop for water forced me to structure time for water collecting into my daily schedule, which was surprisingly difficult to do even though the Science Center and Botanic Gardens are a 2 minute walk away. Often times I would forget (or be too lazy) to refill my water buckets during the day, and then I would want water for a shower or to brush my teeth in the evening, and I would have none left. This laziness left me in uncomfortable situations of having to stumble to the Botanic Gardens late at night or in the very early morning in the cold to obtain water for a much needed shower.

This very physical experience of having to carry heavy buckets of water to my dorm helped me to understand, in some very, very small and limited way, the massive challenges that people, mostly women and girls, in developing nations experience in having to walk ridiculous distances (an average of ~ 3.5 miles) to gather water for their families everyday. I only had to walk a laughable two minutes to obtain water, and I often found this burdensome. I cannot imagine having to budget hours for collecting water everyday - it would certainly limit what I could accomplish in a given day, and indeed, it significantly confines what women and girls in developing nations are able to achieve. For instance, many girls do not even have the opportunity to go to school because they are responsible for collecting water for their families.

After my water thrifty week, it seemed somehow wrong to be able to wake up this morning, and go into the bathroom and turn the faucet to wash my hands. It felt too easy, too mindless. With that one motion I felt that I had lost the connection to water that I have built in the past week from having to be so intentional and sparing with it. Once again water is an ever-plentiful, available resource in my life. Though the water challenge is over, I will try to hold onto the mindset of using water sparingly and intentionally and also, respecting water for how valuable and essential it is.

WaterWear Backpack: Benefits & Limitations

Our class experiment in which we carried water with technologies commonly used in developing nations, including the trump line, Q-drum, and traditional head carry method, helped me understand how physically taxing it is to transport water over even short distances. During the water carrying experiment, my head, arms, neck, and lower back all ached. I found myself wishing that there was a product, like a backpack, that would allow me to carry water on my back, thereby reducing the physical strain on my body.

WaterWear, a product developed by Greif and Impact Economics, draws on this exact idea. WaterWear is a collapsable backpack intended to reduce the physical burden of carrying water, while offering a safe alternative to unsafe, contaminated water containers. I see many pros and cons to this technology.

Pros:

- Collapsable (can be shipped in large quantities)

- Removable liner for easy cleaning

- Adjustable straps

- Reduces burden on head, neck and arms (distributes weight more evenly)

- Protected spout to keep water clean

- Allows for free hands

- Allows for faster movement

- Don't need help to use 

- Could wear on front or back

Cons:

- Somewhat expensive (~ $10?)

- Non-local materials (polypropylene)

- Burden on upper back

- Can only hold 5.3 US gallons

It appears that the pros of the WaterWear pack outweigh the cons that I have identified. I see the most important pros of this product to be its collapsibility, as compared to other bulky devices like the Hippo Roller, the reduced burden on the head, neck, and arms, and the ability to clean it easily, unlike the Q-drum that is virtually impossible to clean. 

My first concern with the WaterWear pack is that it expensive and is constructed from materials that cannot be sourced by the underserved communities that would receive this technology. Thus, these communities would be indefinitely reliant on the manufacturer for this product. Though the backpack costs about $10, I do not have a good conception of whether this is a price that impoverished individuals would be willing or able to pay for this technology. Compared to other items we have discussed, like the d.light Solar Lantern that costs ~$20, $10 does not seem totally unreasonable. Lastly, while I believe that this pack would likely reduce neck pain in individuals accustomed to carrying water on their heads, I think this pack could potentially be improved by splitting the pack into two smaller bags, one for the front and the other for the back. This system would more evenly distribute weight across the body, so the carrier wouldn't need to learn forward as much, a posture that strains the back. 

Despite my hesitancy to proclaim the benefits of this technology, the real evidence as to whether the WaterWear pack is successful must come from testing the product in the field with real people. According to the video on the PackH2O website, testers have embraced the packs "with enthusiasm." One Kenyan woman in the video stated that the pack made carrying water easier, faster, and less painful. Thus, it does seem like this pack has great potential. I just wonder if it is possible to design a cheaper backpack with locally sourced materials. If I had $10,000 to dedicate to addressing water issues, I would direct my money to this product only after I was sure that the packs were something that the receiving community wanted, and also if I could not find another more affordable technology with the same range of benefits. 

Learn more about the WaterWear pack here.

Gravity Light Estimation

Martin Riddiford and Jim Reeves, two London-based designers, have created a neat new product, called GravityLight. It's an LED lamp that runs off of nothing but gravity - which means the only cost of the lamp is the upfront cost of buying the product, which makes this product ideal for use in underprivileged communities that rely on dangerous and expensive kerosene lamps to light their homes in the evening.

The lamp operates on a simple concept: a cable hangs down from a gear holding a plastic bag that can be filled with dirt or any other heavy material. The energy produced from the bag being pulled down is sufficient to power an LED bulb for up to 30 minutes.

To learn more about this creative device, look here.

I did some rough calculations to determine how much weight would be required to power this LED lamp for 30 minutes.

I assumed that there were 5 small LEDs in the lamp, each being 3.2 V and 20mA.

I also assumed that the lamp would be mounted about 6 ft (1.8 m) from the ground.

Here are my calculations:

Note: I made a silly unit conversion error: 33 kg actually = 72.75 lbs!

According to my calculations, approximately 33 kg or almost 73 lbs would be needed to power this LED lamp for 30 minutes, which seems like a lot of weight, but not totally unmanageable. It looks like the user of this lamp would need to be very strong to lift this weight every 30 minutes! I will be interested to see if this technology proves to be viable in the communities it is intended for. 

UN Human Development Report 2006, Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty, and the global water crisis Response

Reading the UN water report helped me put my excessive water consumption into perspective. Though water scarcity is unheard of in my native New Hampshire, 1.4 billion people live without dependable access to clean water and 1/3 of the global population lacks access to basic sanitation. Lack of access to these basic needs is a violation of human rights, and improving access must become a global priority if we are to improve livelihoods and undo the deep inequalities that divide countries and people.

Though I’m familiar with issues of resource scarcity, I was somewhat surprised to read that the UNDP sees poverty, inequality, and water mismanagement as the causes of water scarcity, rather than a global shortage of water supply. This means that providing clean water and sanitation to the global population is possible. But the report points to a couple key reasons why this water crisis persists.

First, it is a crisis of marginalized populations: water issues are invisible to the international community because of insufficient awareness and the scale of the problem. While inadequate water access is debilitating and often deadly, "unlike wars and natural disasters, the global crisis in water does not make media headlines … Like hunger, deprivation in access to water is a silent crisis experienced by the poor and tolerated by those with the re- sources, the technology and the political power to end it." When one considers the excessive, careless use of water in rich countries, it should seem unsurprising that wealthy nations overlook water poverty.

Secondly, there's inadequate political will to address the crisis. It would cost $10 billion USD a year to meet MDG’s and significantly improve water access and sanitation globally. This price seems like absolutely nothing when you consider that the governments of the world spend that on military expenses every 8 days! This was the most shocking statistic of the report for me, and I think it illustrates the severely distorted priorities of governments. And, while the water and sanitation crisis is most sorely experienced by the poor, and women and children in particular, these groups lack the political clout to set national priorities. A surge of progressive national polices, backed by international support, is essential. I believe that community-government partnerships, in which a government provides funds and conditions for local grassroots community groups to implement locally specific solutions, can be a powerful model for change.

It is clear that women and children suffer disproportionately from water scarcity and inadequate sanitation. Women spend tons of time collecting and transporting water in water-scarce areas. I was floored to read that "40 billion hours a year are spent collecting water in Sub-Saharan Africa - a year's labor for the entire work-force in France." This is time that women could otherwise spend generating an income, or caring for their children. Inadequate sanitation also constrains the opportunities of children, especially girls. Diarrhea kills 1 child every 3 minutes, making it the #2 cause of death in children. Also, the educational opportunities of girls are constrained by lack of water access, as girls are often burdened with fetching water for their families over long distances. Furthermore, due to inadequate hygiene and privacy in school bathrooms, many girls are withdrawn from school once they reach puberty. Thus, water poverty and inadequate sanitation are viciously reinforcing gender inequalities in underprivileged communities.

It strikes me that improving water and sanitation issues would serve to advance all of the Millennium Development Goals, especially reducing child mortality, promoting gender equality, and increasing environmental sustainability.

Designing & Building a Sharps Container

The practical need for a sharps container for our lab provided our first opportunity to engage with the engineering design process as a team. Our container would serve as a safe receptacle for disposable sharp objects, such as old utility knife blades, that we would generate in the lab. Once the container was full, it would be thrown away into the Wellesley waste stream. Thus, our container needed to be sturdy enough so that the sharps could not puncture through it and harm anyone handling the container or the trash in the future. Our pool of materials was confined to materials we could find in the lab - namely, cardboard, styrofoam, and hot glue.

Before my team began brainstorming, we decided that we wanted our container to be built from less environmentally harmful materials. This criteria immediately ruled out styrofoam. We instead chose cardboard as our material of choice. Cardboard is a thick and rigged material, which would give our container a stable structure that can not be easily punctured by the sharps. And, as the college generates a massive amount of cardboard waste, it would be easy to build more sharps containers once our container became full and was thrown out.

During our brainstorming session we came up with several designs, some of which were quite silly. Our main concern in developing a design was ensuring that the box could be handled safely, so we settled on a "double box design." This consisted of a smaller box with a slot to drop the sharps in, with a cover over the slot. This small box would be suspended in an outer box on L-shaped supports attached to the top and bottom of the outer box. This idea of this design was that if a sharp was to puncture through the inner box, it would still be contained in the outer box, and would not injure the person moving the box. While a new inner box would have to be made after the first one filled up, the outer box would be reusable.

Quick birds-eye sketch of our sharps container

We estimated that the sharps box didn't need to be particularly large, as we did not expect our class of 18 people to dispose of that many sharps during the semester, and the sharps are quite small. Assuming that every member of the class threw out 3 utility knife sharps, an inner box with dimensions of 4 x 4 x 3.25 in would still have plenty of space inside.

Constructing the sharps container was quite simple, but our design changed significantly as we worked. We began by constructing the small box. We first cut out six cardboard squares, which we planned to glue together. We even traced the the corners where the cardboard supports would go, and cut out the supports.

After doing all of this, we realized that tracing out the unfolded box design onto cardboard and then cutting it out as one piece would be faster, easier, and make a more structurally sound box, so we started over. We then folded the cardboard at the lines that we had drawn, and glued the seams.

 

After our small box was constructed, we realized that it was quite sturdy and we decided that constructing a second outer box was unnecessary. We felt confident that the sharps would not puncture through the cardboard, however, we did worry about the safety hazard in the unlikely event that our box got wet.

Our last step was to cut a slit in the top of the box, and then create a cover for it so that the sharps would not escape from the box. We created a cover by cutting out a small square of cardboard and attaching pieces of velcro to the cover and to each side of the slot.

Lastly, to make our sharps box easily distinguishable from the rest of the items in our lab, we painted the box with bright colors!

Flashlight Design

For our first independent project, we were tasked with designing a lantern. We were given an LED lightbulb, a 9V battery, and a fixed carbon resistor - it was our responsibility to find the remaining materials. Our lanterns had to be: functional, aesthetically pleasing, and creatively use materials, while maximizing light. Though I initially imagined crafting a cute paper lantern, this idea was quickly discarded when I realized how teeny my single LED bulb was. I decided that a flashlight would be the best device to maximize the light output of a single bulb.

Though most design processes begin with a sketch, I began with scavenging around the Sustainability Cooperative in which I live for some materials that I could craft into a flashlight. I found a glue bottle to use as the housing, a small terra cotta pot to use as the concave device that would - lined with aluminum foil as a reflector - channel light from the LED into a concentrated beam. For wires, I found some old thick speaker wires which I stripped down and extracted a few copper wires. 

This is the sketch of my flashlight, with a diagram of my circuit:

List of all materials used:

1 9V battery

1 3.2 V LED lightbulb

1 266 Ω resistor

1 Aleene's Tacky Glue bottle, with neck cut off

1 small terra cotta pot

1 piece aluminum foil

4 copper wires (taken from speaker wires)

2 brass fasteners

1 small paper clip

electric tape

paint, for decoration

A resistor is a necessary part of the circuit which provides resistance to limit the flow of the electric current coming from the battery so that a lightbulb with a voltage lower than the battery doesn't "blow out."Though a resistor was provided, I had to choose the resistance value that I needed for my circuit. I calculated that I needed a 290Ω resistor using Ohm's law: V = IR, where V is voltage, I is current, and R is resistance. The closest resistor to 290Ω that I had access to was a 266Ω.

My calculation:

9V battery - 3.2 V LED = 5.8 V

5.8 V = 20 mA*R

5.8V/20mA = R

0.29 kΩ = R

290Ω = R

Building the flashlight was a bit of a challenge, but it was also pretty fun. Before construction, I assembled my circuit, without housing, to make sure it worked.

 I first built the cone for the lightbulb by putting the tin foil into the pot and wrapping it around the lip to create a reflective concave surface. I poked a hole through the center of the foil and stuck the lightbulb through. I connected one of these wires to the resistor, and then connected the resistor to the negative terminal of the battery with another wire. I attached a wire to the positive terminal of the battery. Since I don't know how to solder (yet), I attached of my wires to the battery and bulb with tape.

Stripping the audio cable to get wire

Attaching the wire to the bulb

To make the switch, I made two holes in the side of the glue container and poked the brass fasteners in. I shortened the prongs on the fasteners beforehand to make sure that the prongs from the two fasteners wouldn't touch inside the tube (thereby ruining the circuit break). Now it was time to connect the wires, but then I realized that I couldn't fit my hand far enough into the tube, so I removed the fasteners and poked the remaining battery wire and the wire connected to the LED through the holes and wrapped them around the pins, which I stuck in. I wrapped one end of a paper clip around one of the fasteners - if the other end of the paper clip is looped around the other fastener, the circuit will be complete, and the light will turn on. Finally, I taped the battery down to the bottom of the tube so that it wouldn't jiggle around. To complete my flashlight, I fed the two wires from the resistor and the switch through the pot and connected them to both prongs on the LED, and glued the pot into the glue tube.

Designing and constructing the flashlight was easier than I anticipated. However, I made a couple mistakes. When I finished building and turned on the switch, lo and behold!...my bulb didn't light up. This was very frustrating, and I had to problem shoot. It turns out that I had connected the wire attached to positive terminal of the battery to the negative leg of the LED instead of the positive leg. Also, during this project I wasted a lot of time disconnecting and then reconnecting wires because I didn't spend enough time thinking about the order in which I would assemble different parts of the flashlight. In the future, I will plan out the steps of the building process more before jumping into it.

The finished product in action!

I am proud that, aside from the bulb, resistor and battery, I was able to construct a flashlight using recycled materials. However, one of the limitations of my lantern is that once the battery dies, it will be very difficult to replace it because there is no easy way to access the inside of the housing as the top is glued on. I envision that my flashlight could be easily built by anyone with a few basic craft supplies. Since the light is actually quite bright, the flashlight can function as any store-bought flashlight can. I will keep mine at hand in my room in case Wellesley has any unexpected power outages...

Thoughts on Poor People’s Energy Outlook, 2010

            Energy is foundational to my lifestyle, and yet, it is a resource that I so often fail to appreciate. While wealthy nations are entirely dependent on modern energy, roughly 35% of the global population still lacks access to even basic energy services. The most salient point of this report is that access to modern energy services is a fundamental prerequisite to alleviating poverty and improving the lives of impoverished communities in developing nations.

Millennium Development Goals related to education, health care, information and communication technology, income generation, and gender equality cannot be achieved without improved energy access. I found the most resonating illustration of this idea to be the reliance of poor households on biomass fuel. I knew that gathering firewood was a huge burden for women in developing nations, but I was shocked to learn that the women in Tanzania, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia spend more than a day a week collecting wood. Moreover, biomass fuel is the culprit of so many serious health problems in developing nations: cooking with biomass causes 1.4 million deaths per year, with women and children most affected. I was surprised to read that household air pollution is the second greatest environmental risk factor for humans worldwide. During a homestay in Nicaragua, I experienced this problem firsthand. My host mother suffered from an unidentified respiratory disease, and regularly had terrible coughing fits, which she attributed to standing over a smoky cooking fire for many hours every day. My host mother was stuck in a catch-22 situation: she needed a fire to cook food for family and to keep them warm, but this life-preserving act was simultaneously endangering her own health. In addition to these health concerns, biomass fuel is also environmentally destructive, as it causes deforestation and contributes to climate change. 

Fortunately, sustainable and affordable solutions do exist. One such cooking fuel technology that I have experience with is a simple biogas fuel system. The system is essentially a large plastic bag containing manure, which inflates as methane is released. This methane can then be piped into a home and used to fuel a gas stove (shown below). Another neat technology that this report discussed is a zeer pot: a passive way to preserve food in a double clay pot with wet sand in between. I think these sort of technologies are powerful because 1) you don’t need an engineering degree to construct them, 2) they can be created using cheap materials locally available to the community, and 3) there’s the potential for local businesses to develop for the sale of these technologies.

I was pleased to see that many of the cost-effective technologies that this report mentioned ran on renewable energy, specifically solar power (such as solar lanterns). This illustrates to me that developing nations don’t need to follow the same dirty pattern of development as "developed nations." The report states that extension of “the grid” is actually not a cost-effective or feasible solution for supplying energy in developing nations, due to lack of infrastructure. Instead, off-grid, renewable tech such as small appliances can be more reliable and environmentally sound.

This report describes the relationship between economic and energy poverty as “a vicious circle” with unclear causality. Does increased energy access lead to a growth in incomes, or does a growth in incomes produce increased energy access? I believe that wealth doesn't need to precede energy access. Instead, by developing low-cost technologies, and empowering and educating communities, poor populations can gain some energy access, which can help them escape poverty.

Photo: earthedintl.blogspot.com

About Me

Hello!

I'm Mackenzie, a senior environmental studies and history major at Wellesley College. I'm originally from Charlestown, New Hampshire. I have largely studied the environment through a social science lens, which has allowed me to understand the environmental degradation and social injustice that results from our food system, energy policies, consumption, and the disconnect between our actions and their consequences. My broad interests are sustainable agriculture, ecological restoration, and international development. At Wellesley, I live in the Sustainability Cooperative, or "Scoop." Living in this intentional community is a big part of my life, and I will refer to it often!

I come to EXTD 120 with the desire to gain a deeper understanding of the technological challenges facing communities in developing nations. It is my goal to develop a set of engineering design skills that can be applied to confronting these problems through appropriate and sustainable technology. As one who usually cowers at the mention of math or "hard science," I hope that this course will increase my confidence and ability to engage in and apply these disciplines. Another motivation for taking this class is my interest in exploring the field of engineering for the first time. This semester I look forward to being challenged, gaining insight, and hopefully, creating something that can (in a small way) make the world a more sustainable place.