Georgia Tech students Chris Donegia (CE), Caroline Smith (CEE), Emily Woods (GTRI), Molly Nelson (GTRI) and Laura Kovalchick (GTRI) have been selected to compete in the prestigious 2011 Open Minds Competition.  Open Minds (formerly known as March Madness for the Mind) is the acclaimed annual exhibition of cutting-edge innovation from NCIIA's best student teams. The exhibition takes place each year during NCIIA's annual conference, and is an opportunity for student teams to demonstrate their products and companies, and receive local and national media coverage.

Donegia, Smith, Woods, Nelson, and Kovalchick are addressing the issue of sanitation in developing countries through the development of a dry latrine system that provides sustainable, affordable, and safe treatment of human waste using the sun’s energy. While some dry (waterless) latrines are already being marketed, a system has yet to be developed that effectively inactivates Ascaris cysts, which present a major health risk to people in communities with inadequate sanitation facilities.

The team is working to create a latrine that captures both solid and liquid wastes, provides space to store solid waste for a specified time, exposes it to concentrated sunlight in order to deactivate and kill all pathogenic organisms, and then uses the deactivated waste as fertilizer in a revenue-generating microenterprise. They have fielded several prototypes in remote areas of Bolivia and, using lessons learned from the field, are currently working to refine the design to make it more robust, effective and profitable.