Decentralized resource recovery from solid and liquid bio-waste

#SDGAction42544

Description

Intro

Through the social enterprise -Compost Baladi SAL- we are designing, manufacturing and installing fully automated home-scale in-vessel composting devices and/or anaerobic bio-digesters, for the treatment of wastewater and/or solid organic waste while allowing the recovery of cooking gas, irrigation water and/or soil fertilizer. These solutions are a direct response to the on-going refugee crisis and the national waste management crisis in Lebanon. They are designed to serve urban, rural and refugee areas.

Objective of the practice

Compost Baladi SAL seeks to promote the sound management of organic and non-organic waste fractions using appropriate technologies that are tailored to local economic, social and environmental conditions. We thrive to accomplish this through our team of local and international experts and equipment suppliers to provide our beneficiaries with the most suitable service on the market. 
 
Our solutions provide interlinkages among SDGs and targets through solutions for sanitation, water management, recycling and provision of sustainable alternative energy. 
 
Our solutions reply on innovation and focus on the circular economy.

Partners

Our local partners: Fondation Diane (Investment Fund) and Agrytech (Accelerator)
International partners: VNG International (Netherlands), Switch Med (UNIDO/UNEP) and CEWAS (Switzerland).

Implementation of the Project/Activity

Through sales to households, municipalities, institutions and NPOs, our devices are all over Lebanon. We provide after sales follow up to check that the user is benefiting from the technology.

Results/Outputs/Impacts

In the last two years, we were able to directly or indirectly through our technology and know-how to help in diverting more than 1,000 tons of solid organic waste.
We also successfully installed, in the summer of 2018, two wastewater and solid organic waste treatment devices in refugee settlements, treating 2,000 L per day of bio-waste.

Enabling factors and constraints

The waste management crisis in Lebanon since 2015 hadn't have a sustainable solution by the government, leaving households, communities development agencies in need for a technically sound solution for organic waste.
The investment from our investor helped us start the enterprise.
Constraints are mainly related to the lack of governmental support.
Our combination of social mission and profitability helped us to be sustainable.
Our technologies are innovative and in some cases include inventions developed in-house.

Sustainability and replicability

At Compost Baladi, we pride ourselves on our following core values: community and environment, customer centricity and integrity.
Our product lines are developed to be affordable to the largest segment of the market.
We apply a lean approach to business to adapt with market and policy changes.

Conclusions

We are a mission-driven for profit company that has developed a sustainable business model to help and solve the national waste management problem by focusing on small and medium-scale projects. 
We found that our brand has a feel-good effect on people and like to support our mission. 
We are using our success nationally to expand regionally and internationally in regions with similar challenges than Lebanon.

Other sources of information

All information are on: www.compostbaladi.com

SDGS & Targets