Concrete Roof Tiles, puzolanic cement, earth houses, ecomaterials: EcoSur - Home

How the crisis called "The Special Period" affected Cubans after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Eurpoe is the focus of reflections upon those times by Fernando Martirena with Kurt Rhyner, both key players and motors of the EcoSur Network.

 High ranking visitors to a newly started production unit in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) congratulated the manager of the local EcoSur partner for an impressive start into a new project which aims to form micro-enterprises to produce construction materials for the country's reconstruction. Helen Clark, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand and actual administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) expressed her satisfaction at the high quality of walling and roofing elements produced by the women and men of the workshop in a neighborhood badly damaged by the 2010 earthquake.

At the beginning, the toilet bowl used by the Dry Toilet was very simple, without the water trap. The solids and liquids felt directly to the drying buckets under the surface. In 2010, a Urine Diverting Toilet Bowl was built and this new toilet bowl transformed the Dry Toilet in an UDDT: Urine Diverting Dry Toilet.
Estuardo Quispillo, technician and instructor from EcoSur Ecuador went to Haiti to train the staff in UDDTs building using a very practical fiber glass mould.

Much has been written about the slow pace of reconstruction in Haiti. While those reports are largely true, there are also positive developments. The EcoSur partner Sofonias Haiti is reporting encouraging facts and looks with hope into the future.

The INTEC (Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo) and the CUJAE (Polytechnical University of Havanna) have recently published two Diploma thesis on buildings with ferrocement panels like the ones used by grupo sofonias in the reconstruction of Haiti. Both came to similar conclusions and recommend the technology because of its high resistance to earthquakes and hurricanes and the savings in materials, energy, time and finances

In the rural and semi-urban communities, that are the main target of the housing projects from the EcoSur network, sewer systems are non-existent and sewage disposal becomes a problem, sanitary and economic. The Dry Toilet, developed in Namibia by the Clay House Project*, has become an adequate and inexpensive solution for countryside communities and outskirts.