WeCo launches its serie A Fundraising for the UN World Toilet Day

By announcing the launch of its fundraising for the UN World Toilet Day on November 19 with impact funds, corporate funds and industrialists, WeCo reaffirms its ambition to become the world leader in innovative, autonomous and sustainable toilets to fight against water waste in the world in toilet flushing.

While 4.2 billion people in the world do not have access to drinking water, 7 billion cubic meters of this common good are wasted on toilet flushing every year, including 3,171 liters every second in France.
This is why the UN has created the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including number 6, which aims to ensure access to water and sanitation for everyone. As well as the UN World Toilet Day on November 19 every year, created almost 10 years ago at the initiative of Jack Sim, the founder and President of the World Toilet Organisation, is an opportunity to talk about crucial and even vital topics related to water and sanitation.

WeCo SAS, created in 2014 by 7 shareholders from France, Germany, Dubai and South Korea and becoming an impact company in 2021, has developed the first so-called "deeptech" technology for innovative black water treatment and recycling allowing water recycling to reduce toilet water consumption for flushing by 97%. WeCo's Water Recycling Eco Toilets™ are the only toilets in the world that treat and recycle wastewater on-site into treated water for closed-loop flushing. They are the only ones to combine the advantages of conventional toilets: flushing and hygiene of connected toilets, with those of chemical and dry toilets: autonomy and mobility, water savings. They are autonomous and therefore mobile, easily installed and moved to any place where public toilets are needed.

WeCo has been committed to a unique mission for the past 8 years: to stop wasting drinking water for toilet flushing, by reusing it in a sustainable, hygienic and safe way thanks to the innovative black water treatment and recycling developed with the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and by an IoT it is developing with Montpellier Engineering. France is one of the countries that reuses its wastewater the least, with only 0.6% reuse, while Spain reuses 14% and Singapore 80%.

This innovation has been recognized by numerous innovation awards around the world: Gates Foundation Award, European Commission Seal of Excellence (EIC), Water Europe Innovation Award, EIT Climate KIC, French General Secretariat for Investment (PIA) Project, Solar Impulse label, Construction 21...

This is why the European Union is building a whole body of directives and regulations to promote, and even oblige, the reuse of wastewater, with the European regulation of June 5, 2020 on the reuse of wastewater to limit the use of water bodies and groundwater with the objective of increasing from 1.7 billion cubic meters of reuse per year to 6.6 billion, to reduce water stress by 5% in 2025. The same goes for the revision of the Urban Wastewater Directive, requiring the reuse of sludge (treated wastewater) as soon as municipalities have 1,000 inhabitants.

It is the same with the development of ISO (international), CEN (Europe) and French (AFNOR) standards, national and international normative groups of which the President of WeCo Cécile Dekeuwer is an expert member of the water and sanitation groups. She participated in the work of experts for the adoption of the ISO 30500 standard on autonomous sanitation systems, with the support of the Gates Foundation.

In addition to this objective of certifying WeCo technology, since 2018 the company has been developing toilets with Alstom for on-board systems such as trains, with the aim of industrializing the technology in compact, plug & play mode, for constrained environments such as mobile systems, for construction sites, and event sites....

At the same time, the company is working on its internationalization to meet the demands of the European program 100 climate neutral cities, or the one of Dakar in Senegal, which will install the first WeCo toilets in Africa. Beyond these growing demands, WeCo SAS is building its international development plan, starting with Switzerland, then the Netherlands and Germany.

This is why the company is launching a Series A financing round. This fundraising is aimed at impact funds, corporate funds, clients and industrial partners who wish to support the development and industrialization of an innovative technology with a strong social and environmental impact, saving 97% of our "blue gold".

The scale of the innovative, mobile, ecological toilet markets is explained by the absence of existing solutions to meet the need to save water through its reuse, in addition to the public hygiene problem linked to the lack of public toilets in a context of growing urbanization (66% of the population will live in cities in 2030). This tension is accentuated by the health crisis, which reinforces the need for public toilets. It is also a question of attractiveness of the territories at a time when the majority of inhabitants and tourists plebiscite public toilets as priority equipments to be installed by the communities.

The WeCo solution is the only one able to answer all these markets of connected toilets, ecological toilets and mobile toilets, and thus become the world's leading unicorn for innovative, autonomous and sustainable toilets.

Where to find the first WeCo public toilets: at the Cité du Design in St Etienne, at the Grande Borne market in Grigny, on the F. Mitterrand mall in Rennes, at the Rabelais college in Blois, at the Ventrus restaurant in La Villette, and at the Francioli company in Ain.

To learn more about WeCo toilets:

• watch the Arte report on the toilets of the future: Rediffusion on Arte TV
• watch the interview of the President founder Cécile Dekeuwer on BFM TV
• watch the interview in Usine Nouvelle
• visit the WeCo YouTube channel