New PHLUSH exhibit premiers at National VOAD Conference

This week the Portland Hilton is buzzing with the energy of hundreds of impassioned volunteers and salaried colleagues who manage the nation’s most important disaster response agencies. It’s the annual conference of National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster a coalition of hundreds of organizations – faith-based, community-based, and other non-governmental organizations – and 55  VOADs…

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Will no-mix toilets work on San Francisco streets?

At PHLUSH we’ve been looking at urine diversion technologies and think no-mix toilets are going to be really important in the future.  And we’re keen to get the word out as we consider earthquake preparedness and what to do for emergency household toilets when we can’t flush.  So a proposal, picked up by the New York Times,…

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Swiss Economist Backs Us Up: Portlanders Pay too Much for Sanitation

Writes Molly Danielsson, who, along with Mathew Lippincott, has received a stipend at Cewas in Switzerland.  Part of a group of entrepreneurs launching sanitation businesses, they are meeting and interviewing experts in the field.  Watch this space for reports of their discoveries. Mat and I had a chance to hear Isabel Guenther speak on May…

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Talkin’ Sh*t in Europe

Molly Danielsson writes from Europe: Last week Mat and I got to meet Thilo Panzerbieter of the German Toilet Organization. Thilo is a civil engineer who was working on installing ecological sanitation systems in the Zambia when he decided to focus his attention on advocating for sanitation work in his home country. Thilo’s two advocacy…

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Ecological sanitation is dinner topic

Most of the thirty odd Portlanders who gathered for dinner at a private home in the Laurelhurst neighborhood had had the same experience. When they had suggested ways to make sanitation more sustainable, there were always some friends and family members who simply refused to discuss the matter. Taboos about human excreta run deep. So,…

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Falmouth MA to vote on 2.2m for Sewage Alternatives Research

Mathew Lippincott writes: In what may be a watershed moment for alternatives to centralized, piped sewage, The Selectmen of the town of Falmouth, Massachusetts have voted to put on the town ballot a referendum to limit sewer planning costs to $500,000 and spend the rest of the sewer planning budget investigating alternatives to sewers, including…

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