Sustainable Development Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

According to SDG6, clean, accessible water for all is an essential part of the world we want to live in and there is sufficient fresh water on the planet to achieve this. However, due to bad economics or poor infrastructure, millions of people including children die every year from diseases associated with inadequate water supply, sanitation and hygiene.

With the aim of accomplishing this goal, many problems related to accessibility to water, scarcity, pollution, wastewater and sanitation need to be solved.

Initial approach to our challenge:  Using the 6W tool, our team decided to focus on water waste, more specifically looking at domestic water consumption. We realized that water waste in households is the field where we can impact most and where we have more information to work on. In fact, finding a solution to sensibilize users in water usage, both on a psychological side and practical savings could facilitate reaching our target.

The challenges that we choose to approach are:

• “How might we manage greywater so users can increase their domestic water-use efficiency?”
• “How might we design a smart solution in domestic water supply so users can be aware and limit their consumption to improve their economy?“

Based on SDG6 the WaterWall solves the problem of the single use we give to clean water for domestic purposes.

WaterWall reduces the amount of water that an individual requires for day to day activities in a domestic context by recycling grey water. The solution integrates various sources of greywater and produces potable water, allowing recycling of up to 80% of the water that passes through WaterWall and reducing up to 43% of an average citizen individual consumption. It employs latest technology water filters, uses sensors to capture data and ensure water quality. Through IOT, it encourages better use of water and control of the overall functionality and maintenance.

This is our final WaterWall design. Our product consists on a set of filters. The filters we use follow this order: sand filter to remove solid particles, carbon activated to filter chemicals, plasma discharges to kill bacteria, and a chemical dispenser in the drinkable water tank. It is known and proven that these filters work properly in water purification systems; however, we propose to gradually change our actual filters to more disruptive technologies (e.g. HEFP, Graphene).

SDG 7 – Clean and affordable energy

During the coldest months of winter, heat is one of the basic needs for people to live. The access to proper heating along with good insulation, not only increases life expectancy but also creates higher quality of life.

In Barcelona, temperature can drop down to 5°C during winter. Because most of the houses and apartments in this region are badly insulated, people rely on heaters powered by electricity or gas. However, around 10% of Barcelona citizens have energy poverty and it is estimated 170,000 people do not have access to proper heating.

To dig deep about the problem, we interviewed multiple experts and more than 30 people who are identified as high risk of energy poverty. Afterwards we’ve concluded that the most vulnerable persons are: elderly people, either unemployed or pensioners, that tend to live by themselves, have low income and reside in very old houses with bad insulation.

It is important to mention that the vast majority of houses in Spain have not installed a proper heating system, since the country is not in a cold region and this may not seem a problem. The reality is that the lack of this system exposes low income inhabitants to hard or even dangerous situations, having little margin to react. These people often find themselves in having difficulties to pay their monthly energy bills. The situation in winter gets worse for them, because heaters consume a massive amount of energy, which can significantly increase electricity bills. These people are vulnerable, and we wanted to help them.

In order to do that, we raise the question: “How might we help elderly and low-income people from Barcelona, who can’t access proper heating, so they can improve their quality of life?

Our solution is Bwarm. An inexpensive smart heating system that is modular and user-oriented. Bwarm implements the concept of “Heating people, not places” by focalizing all the heat to the users. Normal heaters, based in convection heat transmission, waste a lot of energy because they are made to heat all the air around. That is, a whole house or an entire room is warmed up when, in most cases, it is unnecessary.  In order to solve that, our solution carefully manages the energy waste while delivers heat using novel heat sources.

Bwarm is a modular heating system. It works by detecting both your location and temperature to switch on/off different heat sources towards you. To do so, B-warm has thermal cameras and a central smart algorithm (Arduino-based microcontroller), that via Bluetooth merges all the system with the heat sources.

The modular system is composed of:

– The brain: that has a thermal camera and the algorithm, to regulate the sources.

– IR Panels: that are surfaces that radiate heat

– Directional Heat Sources: that rotate to point the heat towards you.

If needed, the product elements can interact with each other in a modular way. Therefore, Bwarm can improve efficiency by heating only the person’s body, consuming energy in a different way.

Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger

The starting point of our project is SDG 2 Zero Hunger and the goal of the project is to identify a specific problem and ideate an innovative solution to that problem.

The problem we are facing is quite simple to understand — fresh fruit and vegetables arrive at different maturation stages to decision points. Not considering these variations result in countless food losses throughout the whole supply chain.

To make it clearer, let’s us explain the example of bananas. Bananas go a long way from Colombia to Belgium. Due to temperature fluctuations inside the shipping containers, bananas arrive in different ripening stages. Since we cannot distinguish them, half are sent to Paris and the other half to Moscow, even knowing that some of them will definitely spoil before reaching the final consumer. What if Belgian distributors could distinguish mature bananas from not-so-mature ones so we only send to Moscow the bananas we know will make it there and send the riper ones to closer destinations as Paris?

To solve such problem, we have designed a tracking system to provide the information they need in the decision point. To provide this information we need to store the conditions every fruit box has been through, estimate the ripeness of the fruit from this data and finally make this information accessible from the decision point.

Our mission is to provide an enhanced TRACEABILITY of fruit and vegetables throughout the whole supply chain. How do we do it?

We need three main technologies to implement this tracking system: a way to identify every fruit box, a sensing device and a database to store all the data collected and estimate the ripeness.

RFID system

We will identify every fruit box with an RFID tag. Compared to traditional barcodes, a bunch of those tags can be read at once from a distance and this highly improves efficiency.

Sensors

To know the conditions the fruit boxes have been through, we have designed a sensing device that measures key characteristics such as temperature, humidity and colour. Another interesting measurement is ethylene, a gas that accelerates fruit ripening.

Database and ripeness estimation

Finally, we need a server with a huge database to store all the data we acquire through sensors. In this server, we also need an intelligent algorithm to estimate the ripeness of fresh products, the current purpose of this whole system — in the conclusions we are briefly exploring how this tracking system can be used for other interesting purposes.

For the exposition of our prototype, we solder three sensors — temperature/humidity/pressure,
gas and color — to a PCB board and connect them to an Arduino which will read the data and
sent it to the computer.