Projects & Research

Martha Merson, Nickolay Hristov, Betsy Towns

Project Staff
Elise Levin-Güracar

Climate disasters will exacerbate the frequency and number of people affected by sewage. Functional flush toilets in the US are the norm, yet many rural residents lack municipal sewer connections. The unhoused, including evacuees from climate disasters, as well as trans community members all struggle daily with safe options for everyday bathroom use and stand to benefit from adoption of new systems and approaches. With an interdisciplinary team committed to art, design, public service, and STEM education, we design opportunities for engagement to overcome the “ick” to make biotech solutions for managing waste and mitigating flooding impacts intriguing, palatable, and even desirable to our neighbors. Findings are relevant to initiative planners who need public buy-in to proceed.

Water nurtures life and yet, when mixed with feces and urine, quickly becomes a problem to be managed. Hurricanes and flooding cause wastewater in overwhelmed sewage systems to contaminate land and waterways. Septic systems leak and function poorly when the ground is saturated. At the opposite end of climate extremes, drought has resulted in severe water shortages in some areas, and toilets can account for nearly 30% of a household’s water usage (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2024).

When tech solutions become available, pushback can derail adoption (e.g., Green et al. 2023 and Spiegel, 2022). Without significant efforts on the front end to design deployment strategies, innovative, biotech solutions that mitigate the range of climate change impacts will likely fail to be widely adopted.

In this research planning phase, our goal is to pilot a survey and facilitated conversations that engage participants in designing approaches to manage humanure, an intensely intimate, yet stigmatized part of life. The team, including advisors and consultants, recruit recreational enthusiasts, representing North Carolina’s diversity of Latinx families, Black faith leaders and their congregations, and LGBTQIA undergraduates to participate. During facilitated conversations of mixed audiences (including scientists, regulators, and others), project leaders will:

• Goal 1 Consult with and engage prospective users of new tech to identify priorities, values, areas of curiosity, and preferences of diverse NC residents. Objectives. By the end of Year 1, analyze qualitative data to shed light on (1) measures to increase trust and understanding among scientists and publics, (2) engagement vs. repulsion with the topic of human waste disposal, and (3) concerns vs. gratifications with future waste management technology concepts in a subsection of participants from diverse and marginalized populations. By the end of Year 2, the project team will have completed a design for experiential engagement useful for broadening participation.
• Goal 2 Lay the groundwork for a market segmentation study that establishes profiles and delivers benefits to participants on a continuum from eager adopters to opposed. Objectives. By the end of Year 2, completed and piloted a survey and shown that it solicits responses from the intended participants across a range of distinct profiles, setting the foundation for a larger market segmentation study.

This project lays the groundwork for community conversations about the design and deployment of strategies for innovative, biotech solutions that mitigate the range of climate change impacts—increasing the likelihood of such solutions to be widely adopted.