EarthEnable was started with a dream to improve health outcomes through simple and affordable solutions. We came together at Stanford's design school, through a class called Design for Extreme Affordability, in partnership with the MASS Design Group.
We traveled to Rwanda through the class to understand how sub-optimal homes affected physical and emotional health outcomes. We were shocked to discover the significant health problems that dirt floors cause. Studies show that simply eliminating a dirt floor from the home results in dramatic reductions in childhood asthma, diarrhea, malnutrition, and parasitic infestations. In impoverished children, the cognitive improvements and health benefits of a proper floor are on par with providing nutritional supplements (Gertler et. al., 2007).
It then became our mission to find a way to floor Rwanda. And it turns out the solution was right in our own backyard! Earthen flooring has experienced a revival in the western United States, with many sustainability oriented home-owners refining the technique to install modern earthen floors in their homes. These floors are easy to clean, abrasion-resistant, and beautiful. All we had to do was find a way to adapt this for Rwanda.
In the United States, earthen floors are made by hand with several layers of earthen materials, without the need for industrial tools, and sealed by a layer of drying oil that polymerizes with oxygen, forming a plastic-like resin on the floor. Due to the variations in soil composition and in availability of local materials between sites, no one perfect formula exists. As a result, the primary limitation to widespread adoption in earthen flooring techniques is the level of training and site-specific testing that is required. EarthEnable brings modern earthen flooring to the poorest Rwandans by bridging this gap in training and providing local masons with the necessary expertise, business skills, and professional tools.
While conducting our initial pilots in Rwanda in collaboration with Scott Howard of Earthen Hand, we discovered that linseed oil, the traditional drying oil used in the United States is extremely expensive. We thus brought on co-founder Rick Zuzow, a biochemistry Ph.D. candidate at Stanford with a broad expertise in lipids and chemistry, to find a way to chemically convert locally available oils to linseed-equivalents. Together, we developed a proprietary process to locally manufacture drying oil at a fraction of the cost of linseed oil. EarthEnable is therefore able to install a floor for 80% cheaper than concrete, the only modern alternative.
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