Fieldwork 2023

Wednesday & Thursday August 2-3

Jonathon Osika, Dianareli Dolores, Zach Ostrand, Adam Belkin-Rosen

Meeting with Joelo and Co.

Zach and Jon met with Joelo once again to discuss a partnership further. The first main takeaway from the meeting was that Peak Off-Grid has put out many papers regarding their effects on island communities, such as Marinduque, since deploying their microgrids. Through a quick skim, it was easy to see correlations between job and health security, and overall access to water. This was a great indicator that Peak shares the altruistic values of the other ventures in the impact fellowships and would align with us in a partnership.

The second main takeaway was Joelo’s positive reaction to our claims for an RO-DCMD hybrid. After sharing that DCMD was reported to raise RO water recovery by up to 30%, Joelo was quite surprised and claimed it would be a disruptive shift for the Philippine desalination efforts if implemented correctly.

That leads to the third and final takeaway: Joelo’s interest in future collaboration. After speaking a bit more about how our system would work in connection with his, Joelo urged that we speak to his CTO who is conveniently based in NJ. There seemed to be lots of potential for a supremely beneficial partnership between our two ventures, demonstrated with Joelo’s interest in helping. He was able to give us names for funding and government contacts that would help us move research forward. It seems that if we can get a prototype developed over the next year, Joelo would be our first key adopter.

Philippines Partnership for Sustainable Agriculture (PPSA) Meeting

Adam and Dianareli went to Taguig with a few members of Agriwrap to meet with Director Amy Melissa Chua and Partnership and Engagement Manager Jade Herrera. The purpose of the meeting was to better understand what PPSA does and how they could be of assistance in connecting us to partners in the water and agriculture sectors.

PPSA does not conduct technical research on its own; it supports research by connecting projects to funding and other resources. PPSA has primarily supported projects related to analysis of challenges and successes in the agricultural industry.

When asked about water related projects, Director Chua explained that the Manila Water Foundation is looking into methods for sustainably processing waste from water treatment. We also learned that there is currently a high demand for research into fertilizers optimized for regenerating nutrients. Aside from these, it was explained that PPSA does not directly work with any water-related projects.

When discussing support for the ideation stage of research projects, Director Chua explained the Learning Alliance Working Group. This group connects public and private institutions as well as government agencies to support research. In the words of the Director, the group “Bridges those who have questions to those with answers.”

Later we discussed a PPSA contact that could connect our team to PCAARRD, IRI, and other desalination and water treatment groups. We were told to send an email introducing ourselves that PPSA could forward to PCAARRD.

In terms of funding, PPSA provides minimal direct funding. It mostly supports grants indirectly by branching institutions. PPSA only directly funds projects unless the project is aligned with the goals of PPSA. It does not fund international projects.

After this meeting, the team planned to send an introductory email to PPSA so that they could connect us with the Manila Water Foundation, PCAARRD, and other potentially interested groups.

UPD Meeting with Anne

Adam and Dianareli met with Anne Hunwick from UPD. She works in Professor Leslie Joy Diaz’s desalination lab with a square Passive Pyramidal Solar Still. Her system’s technology is very different from the desalination team’s and more analog.

Some of the issues she faced desalinating ocean water was that chemically the water was potable, but not biologically. Due to a high chlorophyll concentration and feces count. So she is trying to counteract this issue with the sun’s UV. We think her ability to characterize real ocean water chemically and biologically would be very useful to our product if we decide to desalinate ocean water and not just reverse osmosis brine.

Anne has interviewed officials from Mindoro Island because recently the government setup a rainwater aquaphor in one of the barangays. One of them being the baranguay captain (the highest elected official in a barangay;community) who doesn’t live on the island, but claims that people have access to water. However, the sitio leader (the site leader of a subpart of the respective baranguay) shared that people don’t want to use the rainwater aquaphor because it is expensive and they don’t know how to maintain it so the quality isn’t the best.

A couple key takeaways from the meeting was to setup a maintenance system and to keep in mind that the cost of materials might vary on each location. For example, Anne found that building materials are cheaper in Mindoro than in Manila. Some other takeaways if our system were to supply water on its own is to make sure that it’s more affordable than competing technology in the area, and make sure the water is biologically portable not just chemically.

Monday & Tuesday July 31 - August 1

Jonathon Osika, Dianareli Dolores, Zach Ostrand, Adam Belkin-Rosen

Meeting with Joelo from Peak OffGrid

Jon & Zach met with Mr. Joelo Delgado, founder of Peak OffGrid, a water and electricity distributor that builds island microgrids. At first, we thought Peak would be a competitor to our venture, because they also use solar-powered desalination. However, Peak is concerned with distribution, and utilizes whatever technology fits the situation best.

We may be able to partner with Peak by selling our DCMD system for specialized cases. But first we must understand the capabilities of our system. Zach spent time expanding on Adam & DD’s fluid mechanics calculations to develop projections for a home-scale DCMD system.

Mr. Delgado was helpful in explaining the state of water & electricity utilities in the Philippines, and provided us with contacts at UPLB and Maynilad. We would like to meet with him again before we depart.

Brainstorming Capabilities & Applications

The team met with Sean to discuss the direction the team should take for the remainder of fieldwork now that we are focused on technical advancements and redesign.

Some of the new value propositions made were to make unusable land usable, island habitation, drinking water production, and green desalination for high-income industries. Some new directions that we will be taking for fieldwork is researching competitors in desalination, and finding heat maps of water across the Philippines.

Some general takeaways we had from our discussion: do a study on the cost/output analysis between RO and DCMD plants in the fall, rice is not practical at this point- should start with a less water-intensive crop or greenhouses, and to stay focused on quality of product first and foremost.

Revisiting UPD’s Fabrication Lab (Fab Lab)

The team took another more in-depth tour of the Fab Lab with Professor Mitch. Tito and Professor Mitch informed us that maintenance staff would be able to assist the students with building a prototype at UPD. Tito also suggested two fabrication labs to tour for manufacturing of the membrane casing, building, and/or storage. In case an issue arises where he is too busy to take on our project next year. The team intends to do walk-in tours the next day.

Saturday July 29

Jonathon Osika, Dianareli Dolores, Zach Ostrand, Adam Belkin-Rosen

Debrief on Sparring

Going into the spar with Sean and Khanjan we felt quite clear on our next year’s plans, goals, and direction. After presenting on our project, we were asked many thought provoking questions on our venture, resulting in some large changes. First and foremost, the use of agriculture as our early adopter has been highly discouraged. The value proposition of desalination for drinking water is much more attractive than that of irrigation. We need to cast a much wider net in terms of product-market fit and be creative on how we identify our early adopters. It’s a very tricky situation because our product is best suited to be in a lower resource setting than RO and other conventional desalination methods, but the people who require our less convoluted system, likely don’t have the attributes that make them a good early adopter (low income, hard to reach, etc.).

Another major takeaway is that we are very constrained by our technology. We first must understand (or at least estimate) the capabilities of our technology so that we can find an adopter that matches them. It is very likely that our product would only be a partial solution for rice farms during the dry season given the low volume of water we estimate producing. Finding a market that would be more satisfied with our level of output is likely the best course of action.

On a similar note, productizing our technology into different models would be an attractive way to promote it to new customers. Using artist renderings of a handful of different models that all have different focuses and strengths for different consumers will allow us to expand to multiple markets.

All in all, our conversation was very refreshing considering the many roadblocks we have discovered by pigeonholing ourselves to just agriculture. Our only concern is how to effectively use our time here with activities we otherwise wouldn’t be able to do in the States.

Thursday & Friday July 27-28

Jonathon Osika, Dianareli Dolores, Zach Ostrand, Adam Belkin-Rosen

Farmvocacy meeting

Zach and Jon met with Vince Roy, founder of Farmvocacy. His company implements climate-smart agriculture techniques to smallholder farmers on Mindoro Island. Vince had many great insights on what it meant to implement pilot studies in developing communities and how to gain the beneficiary’s trust. The key takeaways from this meeting were the many connections Vince offered, insights on crop selection, and irrigation techniques as they relate to different regions and farm sizes. Our team has now begun to focus on rice as our crop of choice and those with deep-well pump irrigation systems as a result of this meeting.

Gawad Kalinga Meetings

Adam and Dianareli met with Ms. Joy Guillem at GK’s office in Quezon City. The purpose of the meeting was to establish a connection with them as a partner who could help us find an ideal location to test our process due to their large network of connections to farmers and local governments throughout the Philippines (the exact number of farms was estimated at around 9,000). The team later met with Mr. Dan Bercasio to discuss how the process works, which crops we are interested in using the process in, where we would use it, and the feasibility of drinking water using our process. Following this meeting the team researched the value, water needs, and farming locations of different crops in the Philippines and determined that the ideal testing location would 1) be a rice farm, 2) have access to saltwater in some form, 3) have private irrigation systems with pumping from wells, 4) be a reasonable distance from Metro Manila (<3 hours). GK representative Mr. Bodoy O. is currently assisting the team in finding a testing site as of the 28th of July and will contact us to let us know if a site with the desired traits exists.

Department of Mining, Metallurgical, and Materials Engineering Meeting

Adam, Dianareli and representatives from the other Filipino GSIF teams met with Professor Mitch from the Department of Mining, Metallurgical, and Materials Engineering. They were toured through the department's lab facilities. There was a machine to make masks that could potentially be used to make membranes (first picture). There were more labs afterwards used for characterizing materials like metals and rubbers.

Professor Diaz could not join our meeting as she was working remotely. We received her email through Professor Mitch, so that we could ask her about her desalination research and the potential of her leading a team that would run a pilot rig at UPD.

Moldex

Adam and Dianareli met MOLDEX representatives today to discuss having them as a local supplier for piping and a manufacturing partner. They spoke with Ms. Annie Andaya (technical services and bidding manager), Mr. Nathaniel M. Lapida (vice president of sales and marketing), and Mr. Nestor Ramonsito L. Ledesma (AVP sales) at their office in Quezon City. The representatives from MOLDEX described the necessary parameters to scale up a DCMD process. They recommended partnering with Ayala and Mapua University. Additionally, a rough deadline was set to finalize the design by the end of the year so that Moldex could connect the desalination team to a manufacturer and contractor.

Tuesday & Wednesday July 25-26

Jonathan Osika, Dianareli Dolores, Zach Ostrand, Adam Belkin-Rosen

UPD Fab lab Tour

Dianareli, Zach, and Adam met Professor Tito at the University of Philippines-Diliman Fab Lab to discuss the possibility of fabricating and maintaining a DCMD system on campus. They were capable and ready to fabricate the membrane distillation module. A CAD file must be created, taking into account the specifications in Deliya Kim’s dissertation. We will have the capabilities of UPD in mind when designing our system in the fall.

Farmer's Markets

On July 26th, several members of the Desalination Plants and Agro-Waste Food Packaging teams visited the Balintawak Farmer’s Market and Nepa Q-Mart to potentially learn where vendors purchase their produce from. The group that went to Balintawak consisted of Adam, Jon, and Max, while the Nepa Q-Mart group consisted of Zach, DD, Sophia, and Matt. The Balintawak group only found two fluent English speakers, but they were able to record their contact information and the regions from which many of the vendors in the market obtained their goods. It would be best to return with a translator.

The Nepa Q-Mart cohort similarly had language barriers, yet they managed to find two farmers: a banana and dragon fruit farmer. These two did not have a need for irrigation.

Department of Agriculture Visit

Max Beutner, Matt O’Connell and Jon took a short walk to the Quezon City (QC) office of the Department of Agriculture and the collection of Bureaus within it. The intention of our visits was to set up meetings with officials in each bureau about the projects they’re undertaking. At the BSWM, we had hoped to speak with someone in the Water Resources Management Division and the Research and Development Division. Upon arriving, we were introduced to an engineer working on a special project in irrigation pumps where we learned valuable information on how the bureau operates. We were then connected with a director of the special projects under the BSWM and will proceed through her. The other notable interaction came from the Bureau of Agricultural Research which, to our surprise, doesn’t carry out research themself, but rather provide funding to collegiate research projects. For future funding towards a desalination rig at UPD, we got the contact info for the director of funding and will pass it along to the HEED faculty.

Networking Event

Jon attended the Startup Networking Event at QBO in Makati on Wednesday night. At the event, there were four panelists in different fields of the venture capital and accelerator industries. The most pertinent panelist to our venture was Bettina Gamboa, a Program Director at Accelerating Asia. I spoke with her after the panel about the best ways to fundraise for ventures with such small markets, very typical of social ventures like ours. She emphasized that finding alternative sources of revenue and targeting wealthy customers that value our end users and beneficiaries is the best way to capitalize on your obtainable market and simultaneously grow it fully. This was backed up by another connection Jon made at the event with Vincent Roy, founder of Farmvocacy, a venture inciting climate smart agriculture practices in smallholders. He detailed that his strategy for getting enough revenue has been from renting space from farmer cooperatives and using it to solve storage issues faced by smallholders. A great insight from Vincent was that they are unable to work with rainfed farms because they lacked enough infrastructure to be feasible to work with. This demonstrates the idea that without irrigation, many farmers lack access to many services. Jon and Zach will be meeting with Vincent in Makati on Thursday.

Sunday & Monday July 23–24

Jonathan Osika, Dianareli Dolores, Zach Ostrand, Adam Belkin-Rosen

UPD Meet ‘n Greet

The GSIF Philippines cohort met our University of Phillipines-Diliman (UPD) colleagues for lunch at Sweet Inspirations. We met Xyrille and Mary in-person, and met Professor Jill and Professor Edwin. We had brief introductions, then discussed our fieldwork goals and how UPD can be a resource to us.

We toured the UPD campus and were surprised at how open the landscapes were. Professor Edwin, Professor Jill, and Professor Sean gave us valuable advice and connections with UP-Los Banos, Batanga State University, and Gawad Kalinga. These resources will be valuable in refining our product design considerations and gaining credibility.

Solaready Meeting in Makati

Dianareli and Adam attended a meeting with Solaready director, Robert Cruz Puckett, and his colleague, Bobby Julian. Bobby Julian is a professor at Ateneo University, and his background is in energy and corporate finance, environmental project development, and health and catastrophe insurance. Professor Julian informed us about how a lot of online statistics can be very misleading. For instance, when we mentioned that the Philippine's national electrification rate reached 91% in 2016, he clarified that it does not take into account households, but communities that might only have one household connected to an electrical grid.

Mr .Puckett also provided us some background about his company’s past projects. The company specializes in solar panel installation and they have worked with people that are part of the main grid (approximately 8-9 islands are connected), and those off the grid. Those off the grid are usually rural small islands, so they can have very limited supply each day (approximately 4 hours of electricity per day). They tend to lack access to reliable safely managed water sources for drinking, so Mr.Puckett urged the team to pivot to drinking water, due to the high demand and thus, higher impact. The islanders that are off the grid usually have to take a boat to a large town that can supply them with gallons of clean water for drinking. Additionally, the Philippines has lower drinking water standards than the United States.

Mr.Puckett and Professor Julian also suggested that if we were going to stick with agriculture, to develop a more specific use case by deciding on the crop we want to focus on. Rice was not recommended as a lot of water is needed to farm it.

While discussing our current plans for the innovative system we are trying to build at Lehigh University, we were given Dan Barretto’s contact information. Mr.Barretto works with solar thermal tanks and was highly recommended by Mr.Puckett. Additionally, for further technical expertise on solar panels, the team was connected to Professor Rowaldo “Wally” G. Del Mundo. Professor Del Mundo runs the Power Systems Simulation Laboratory at UPD. There they conduct research on solar panels. We intend to contact both soon for networking purposes and further down the road for manufacturing purposes.

For funding, Mr. Puckett and Professor Julian recommended that we ask someone from UPD for a direct contact from the Department of Science and Technology to ask about grants.

According to the pair, solar panels in the Philippines are much cheaper than in the United States due to its close proximity to Chinese manufacturers, so Solaready strictly accepts cash upfront. For financing a modular desalination plant for a small farm, they recommend looking into community financings like the Land Bank and Famer’s cooperatives as farmers typically have bad credit.

The pair also recommended determining the cost of our system by the output and not the total cost of equipment.

Overall, we found our meeting very informative and look forward to contacting them for future questions and endeavors. We gained more contacts for manufacturing and academia; and gained some valuable insight that we hope to do more research on funding, financing, crop needs, and Filipino infrastructure.

Farming Equipment Market

In order to better understand our end user, we have continuously sought ways to witness their way of business through their work on their farm all the way to how they buy their equipment. Since the majority of farmland in this country is that of smallholders (<3 Hectares), getting in contact with individual farmers has become a very tricky process.

Since we’re unable to simply look up nearby farms online, we’ve had to get creative in how we find them. Our strategy on Monday the 24th was to go to the nearby fruit and vegetable vendors on the street and ask where they source their fruit. Were they growing it themself? Did they buy wholesale? The overwhelming response was that all of the vendors in the Quezon City memorial circle sourced their produce from the same 1-3 wholesale markets in the city: Nepa Q Mart and Balintawak Market.

At these markets, we expect to meet with farmers of all varieties in terms of crop types, farm size, equipment used, etc. and hope to ask them as much as we can, ideally identifying future partners who would be interested in hosting a pilot iteration of our product. We plan to go on Tuesday the 25th.

Dean Meeting

Adam attended a meeting at UPD with representatives from other Global Social Impact Fellowship (GSIF) teams to meet with the Dean of the Engineering College of UPD along with other faculty members to discuss how the Office of Creative Inquiry administrates GSIF as a program and as a class. This was part of a larger discussion of how to expand social entrepreneurship and engineering programs such as HEED to include students from a more diverse pool of students and on a larger scale, while also engaging them for longer than one semester, as GSIF does.

Adam explained the basics of our project to the Dean and other Professors when asked, and obtained a brochure of the different engineering majors at the University with a catalog of the different labs, which may be helpful in guiding us when looking for partners in academia when developing the solar and other mechanical components of our desalination system.

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