<![CDATA[Aziul Connections (The Sustainable Systems Lab): Foundational Papers]]>https://www.aziulconnections.com/s/foundational-papershttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hgVJ!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0e84a41c-6db2-49d8-b8f8-3ee4368c9732_500x500.pngAziul Connections (The Sustainable Systems Lab): Foundational Papershttps://www.aziulconnections.com/s/foundational-papersSubstackWed, 17 Jun 2026 12:45:47 GMT<![CDATA[Foundational Paper 003 - What the cruise was never designed to handle]]>https://www.aziulconnections.com/p/cruise-not-designed-hondius-hantavirushttps://www.aziulconnections.com/p/cruise-not-designed-hondius-hantavirusSun, 10 May 2026 17:27:21 GMTHighlights

  • “The pandemic is over.” I heard that line many times before the Hondius. Now I hear it differently.

  • The industry optimizes for the pathogen it already knows, and leaves no room designed for the pathogen that’s coming.

  • When the operational system doesn’t follow the chemistry, the chemistry has no way to deliver.

  • When someone asks about cost three times in a row, they’re not asking the price. They’re telling you nothing else interests them.

  • The sustainable system isn’t the one that never fails. It’s the one with someone always asking what the system isn’t asking itself.

    👋 Hi, it’s Luisa Javier. Welcome to Aziul Connections ( 🌎🔬The Sustainable Systems Lab), where I study how sustainable systems are built for business, leadership, and life.

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When I saw the news about the MV Hondius, I felt it. Three deaths at sea. Passengers locked in for weeks on a ship no port wanted to receive. Empathy came first, because I’m a human being before I’m a scientist.

But after empathy came something more useful. Recognition. I’ve been hearing my sales team report the same scene for months. We prospect cruise lines, hospitals, airlines. We show that our product deactivates in thirty seconds what others deactivate in five to ten minutes. The only question that comes back is cost.

“The pandemic is over.” I heard that line many times before the Hondius. Now I hear it differently.

The Hondius case is still unfolding as I write this. The strain has been identified as Andes virus, the only hantavirus group with documented human-to-human transmission. The World Health Organization (WHO) issued its Disease Outbreak News in early May. Three confirmed deaths, several suspected cases, passengers from more than twenty nationalities, and a response protocol being built in real time, because no manual existed for this specific combination.

I’m going to talk about what I see from the place I’ve worked for the last ten years, which is hygiene as a system. Not hantavirus as a virus.

Every protocol responds to the previous outbreak

In the first piece in this series I proposed something simple: cleaning was never housekeeping. It’s public health infrastructure. And like all infrastructure, it fails in silence.

Now I want to open the question that follows. What happens when that infrastructure faces what it was never designed to face.

The cleaning protocols on cruise ships today are children of the 1970s. The Vessel Sanitation Program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was created in 1975 to respond to recurring gastrointestinal outbreaks on cruises, primarily norovirus. The basic structure is still that, adjusted with later layers. Then COVID came, and protocols added another layer, this time for enveloped respiratory viruses.

Hantavirus falls into a category no standard protocol contemplates.

The industry optimizes for the pathogen it already knows, and leaves no room designed for the pathogen that’s coming.

When the pandemic ended in the collective imagination, even though the virus stayed active, buyers went back to buying the way they bought before. Infrastructure responded to demand. Demand let its guard down.

The chemistry exists. The attention does not.

Here’s where my training becomes useful to the reader.

The most important difference between viruses, for cleaning purposes, is whether or not they have an external lipid envelope. What that difference implies in practice is best seen this way:

Contact times based on labels of disinfectants registered with regulatory agencies. Real efficacy depends on whether the contact time is met in operation, not only on whether it's printed on the label.

Viruses divide into two groups by the presence or absence of an external lipid envelope. Enveloped ones, like SARS-CoV-2 or hantavirus itself, are fragile in the face of detergents, alcohols, organic acids. Their fat layer breaks down with relative ease. Non-enveloped ones, like norovirus, adenovirus, hepatitis A, are armored. Norovirus can survive up to fourteen days on a stainless steel surface. Adenovirus, up to sixty. The difference matters because products that kill one don't necessarily kill the other.

Hantavirus is enveloped. That matters. It means it’s theoretically vulnerable to almost any decent disinfectant. But its mode of transmission changes the calculation. The virus travels in dry rodent excreta dust. When someone sweeps, vacuums, or shakes, the virus aerosolizes and enters through the airways. Available chemistry deactivates it. Common operations disperse it before touching it.

There’s a pyramid I teach when I talk about this. Cleaning removes dirt. Sanitizing achieves a 99.9 percent reduction. Disinfecting reaches 99.999. Sterilizing erases everything. The difference between sanitizing and disinfecting looks small in percentage. It isn’t. For a virus like norovirus, where eighteen particles are enough to make a person sick, the difference between 99.9 and 99.999 is the difference between hundreds of residual particles and units. The difference between a contained outbreak and a runaway one.

Then there’s contact time. The label of a quaternary ammonium disinfectant, the famous quats that dominate the industry, calls for ten minutes of wet contact to reach its declared efficacy. The operational reality is different. A cabin attendant has ninety seconds per surface, sometimes less. The product is applied, dries before completing the cycle, gets wiped. The protocol on paper says 99.999. Operational reality is probably 99 or less. This isn’t the cabin attendant’s fault. It’s system design that assumes conditions that don’t exist.

Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina, who writes Your Local Epidemiologist, asked the right questions in early May. Where the passengers got infected. What excursion, what pre-boarding exposure, what the cases have in common. The questions she asks are operational, not theoretical. And they reveal something worth naming: epidemiologists aren’t asking chemistry whether it works. They’re asking the system whether the chemistry was applied where it should have been, when it should have been, for as long as it should have been.

Let me tell you from the inside. In aviation, where we’ve been working for years, we’ve found that many clients have already migrated to our product. But when we run on-board application audits, we find trays that the product never even reaches. The chemistry has been bought. The application doesn’t happen. They went through the training module, signed the contract, paid for the supply. And still there are surfaces the staff never touches, because shift time runs out or the protocol doesn’t contemplate that specific zone.

When the operational system doesn’t follow the chemistry, the chemistry has no way to deliver.

The problem is not the chemistry available. It’s the attention available.

When the buyer only asks about cost

In the first piece I closed with a line worth bringing back here. Cost is paid by whoever has the least voice in the decision. The daycare that cleans on a household budget, that cost is paid by the children who get sick. The cruise that cleans on a savings protocol, that cost is paid by the passengers who trust.

During the pandemic, talking about contact time in a proposal to an airline or a cruise line was the first advantage we showed. It worked. Buyers understood the argument because collective urgency made them understand it. In 2021, WAYAKIT signed a partnership with Saudi Ground Services (SGS) for sustainable aircraft cleaning across Saudi Arabia. The case documented increased efficacy, reduced operational costs, and improved sustainability simultaneously. Three axes in one validation. The industry read it.

Today, in 2026, that same argument no longer enters the procurement room. My sales team reports the conversation: they explain the time savings, the toxicity reduction, the expanded efficacy against non-enveloped viruses. The buyer listens and always returns to the same question. And the cost? And the cost? And the cost?

When someone asks about cost three times in a row, they’re not asking the price. They’re telling you nothing else interests them. The regulation of chemical products lives the same cycle. Activist Lindsay Dahl, who writes about environmental health policy in the United States, documented a few weeks ago how an entire generation of chemical protections was dismantled in fifteen months since 2025.

The pattern repeats at the institutional level. The CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, founded in 1975 to inspect cruise ships docking at U.S. ports, lost key staff during 2025 and its director retired the week of the Hondius outbreak (STAT, May 7, 2026). The Hondius, operated by the Dutch company Oceanwide Expeditions and sailing under Dutch flag, never fell under that jurisdiction. But the temporal coincidence between institutional emptying and the outbreak is the postcard of the moment: when collective attention drops, biosecurity networks loosen in silence.

How do you talk to a buyer in 2026 about a risk they live as past? How do you name a danger that technically is still there, but that socially has been archived? The honest answer is that you don’t talk to them about the risk. You talk to them about what the current system isn’t ready to handle the day the next thing arrives. That day always arrives. The Hondius only confirmed it this week.

The questions the system doesn’t ask

I’m not going to give you a list of what to do. What helps more is a list of questions the system isn’t asking itself, and that any leader can start asking their own.

]]><![CDATA[Foundational Paper 002 - The invisible infrastructure that decides whether your child gets sick this week]]>https://www.aziulconnections.com/p/invisible-infrastructure-hygiene-public-healthhttps://www.aziulconnections.com/p/invisible-infrastructure-hygiene-public-healthSun, 03 May 2026 13:05:54 GMTKey Points

  • Cleaning was never housekeeping. It is public health infrastructure. And like all infrastructure, it fails in silence.

  • If the only thing telling you your hygiene system works is that it looks clean, you don’t have a system. You have a belief.

  • Hygiene systems fail where responsibility gets diluted.

  • What isn’t designed on purpose ends up designed by default.

  • The cost is paid by whoever has the least voice in the decision.

👋 Hi, it’s Luisa Javier. Welcome to Aziul Connections (🌎🔬 The Sustainable Systems Lab), where I study how sustainable systems are built for business, leadership, and life.

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A daycare with hundreds of children and a household-sized budget

Some time ago, an educational institution caring for hundreds of children reached out to the WAYAKIT team. They wanted a quote on cleaning products. When we reviewed their monthly spend, we found something that stayed with me for several days. They were spending on cleaning roughly what an average household spends.

They weren’t the only one. We have prospected several daycares and schools, and this pattern shows up more often than I would like. It’s not conscious negligence either. What happens with these institutions is what happens whenever a system isn’t designed. It is simply inherited.

What keeps bringing me back to this scene isn’t the number itself. It’s what the number indicates. If an institution caring for hundreds of children is cleaning on a household budget, we are likely talking about an institution cleaning with water. And the parents of those children don’t know.

This is the thesis I want to open today:

Cleaning was never housekeeping. It is public health infrastructure. And like all infrastructure, it fails in silence.

What we call infrastructure, and what we don’t

When someone says public health infrastructure, we picture hospitals. Vaccines. Drinking water networks. Things with plaques, public budgets, ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

Everyday hygiene is also infrastructure. What happens day after day in a daycare, in an aircraft cabin, in a hotel room, in a restaurant kitchen. But we don’t see it that way. We don’t fund it that way. We don’t audit it that way.

An international group of experts led by Matthew Freeman and Jonny Crocker met in Dakar and last year published a paper in Nature Water worth bringing into this conversation. They argue that hygiene interventions at scale have failed to sustain real change because we think of them as standalone products or as campaigns, when in reality they are hygiene systems that need design, maintenance, metrics, and redesign.

Katelyn Jetelina, the epidemiologist behind Your Local Epidemiologist (also published in Spanish as Su Epidemiólogo Local, translated by Dr. Maria Zoco), articulated it a few weeks ago with an image that sticks: public health is an invisible shield. It works quietly in the background, preventing crises we never see. And there lies the design problem. If no one sees it, no one feels it, no one can define it, no one sustains it.

What I learned measuring the invisible

Five years of my doctorate at KAUST were spent measuring ATP on desalination membranes with a lab luminometer. ATP is adenosine triphosphate, the energy molecule of every living cell. When you measure ATP on a surface, you are not counting specific bacteria. You are measuring whether microbial life is present. It’s a fast proxy, imperfect, but brutal in its honesty: the cleaning method worked or it didn’t.

Today we have moved that same measurement into the field, now with portable equipment. Aircraft cabins. Hotel rooms. Trays, seatbelts, remote controls, touchscreens. The measurement happens in situ, before and after applying the existing cleaning protocol. What we see breaks the assumption.

The constant: most organizations trust that their providers are cleaning. Few verify. And when verification happens, the results don’t match the belief.

And this pattern isn’t regional. It is documented globally. In Brazilian hospitals, hand hygiene compliance averages 47%. In a study measuring prevalence across hospitals in Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, and Colombia, one in ten hospitalized patients had at least one healthcare-associated infection (12.26% regional average, Mexico 13.24%). At Mexico’s Hospital Infantil Federico Gómez, implementing an automated hand hygiene monitoring system reduced infections by 43.4 to 56.7 percent.

A line worth marking:

If the only thing telling you your hygiene system works is that it looks clean, you don’t have a system. You have a belief.

Where responsibility gets diluted

There is a design pattern sustaining this problem, and it’s worth naming. Hygiene systems fail where responsibility gets diluted.

Parents trust the daycare. The daycare trusts its provider. The provider delivers what was asked of them, almost always at the lowest possible price. And still, children get sick more than they should. A CDC analysis documented that 22% of households of daycare caregivers experience secondary transmission of diarrheal disease. The figure is from 2004 and hasn’t improved enough. Infections that happen inside the daycare end up in the homes, in the siblings, in the grandparents.

Lindsay Dahl, the environmental health lobbyist behind The Environmental Health Brief, names it precisely in a recent essay: there’s a story we tell ourselves about toxic products that goes something like this. The problem is in your home, and the solution is now your personal burden. Swap the pan, filter the water, replace the couch. Her argument is that this narrative is not accidental. It is structural, and the real solution doesn’t live in the individual consumer but in public policy and systems design. Her work focuses on chemical policy, but the principle applies to hygiene more broadly. When the regulatory or institutional system fails, the cost gets transferred to the end user, who almost never has the information or the power to solve it.

There are three specific reasons the system fails in silence. The first is metric. Almost no one measures ATP outside the lab, and what isn’t measured doesn’t enter the operational conversation. The second is the product label. That phrase about killing 99.9% of germs sounds sufficient until you understand against which pathogens. There are viruses that don’t fit trivially in that remaining 0.1%, and the products that inactivate them are different from the ones that kill common bacteria, a technical distinction that almost never reaches procurement. The third is cost. In the United States alone, healthcare-associated infections cost between 28 and 45 billion dollars per year and kill approximately ninety thousand people, most of them preventable. The money procurement saved by choosing the cheapest product is paid by another budget, another family, another shift.

And this is where the system gives itself away. What I am describing is not individual negligence. It is a system designed not to question itself.

The cost is paid by whoever has the least voice in the decision: the child in the daycare, the passenger on the flight, the patient in the hospital bed.

The question no one is asking

I want to come back to the daycare for a moment. Not to resolve it, but to reopen the question.

When I was the mother of a baby boy, many years ago now, it didn’t occur to me to ask. I didn’t have this information. I didn’t have this knowledge. I trusted, the way parents trust their daycares right now, the way passengers trust airlines, the way patients trust hospitals.

Hygiene is public health infrastructure. What isn’t designed on purpose ends up designed by default. By default means: by lowest price, by habit, by blind trust.

The next time you walk into a space where others trust it is clean, it’s worth asking who is measuring what, and who pays if no one is watching. This is not about distrust. It is about applying to hygiene the same logic you would apply to any other critical infrastructure.

In the next pieces of this series, we are going to open the box. What is actually being measured, against what reference, why the products you think are protecting you aren’t always doing it, and what questions are worth starting to ask now, before someone else gets sick.

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Public lab studying sustainable systems across business, leadership, and life. Essays, experiments, field observations and case studies from a climate-tech founder (Dr. Luisa Javier) operating between LATAM and MENA. Aziul = Azul (the planet) + Luisa (backwards)

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About the author: Dr. Luisa Javier

Dr. Luisa Javier is a scientist and climate-tech entrepreneur across LATAM and MENA, focused on designing sustainable systems for business and society. She is the Founder and CEO of WAYAKIT Group and the author of Aziul Connections.

Aziul Connections is the public lab where I study how sustainable systems are built.

“I build sustainable living through WAYAKIT, and study the systems behind it through Aziul Connections.”

Thank you for reading or listening to this article. Share it or leave a comment if you found this information useful.

Luisa

References

  1. Freeman, M. C., Crocker, J., et al. (2025). Systems thinking for hygiene: an interdisciplinary approach to sustained behavior change. Nature Water. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-025-00424-9

  2. Jetelina, K. (2026). Happy Public Health Week. Your Local Epidemiologist (Substack).

Your Local Epidemiologist
Happy Public Health Week
YLE is on our annual spring break this week! Which means a pause in the newsletters hitting your inbox…
Read more
2 months ago · 388 likes · 21 comments · Katelyn Jetelina

  1. Su Epidemiólogo Local — Spanish-language edition of Your Local Epidemiologist, translated by Dr. Maria Zoco.

Su Epidemiólogo Local
Proporcionarles acceso directo a la ciencia
By Katelyn Jetelina

  1. Telles, J. P., et al. (2025). Hand hygiene compliance in Brazilian hospitals. The Lancet Regional Health – Americas (via PubMed Central). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11875181/

  2. Huerta-Gutiérrez, R., et al. (2019). Prevalence of healthcare-associated infections in Latin America. International Journal of Infectious Diseases (IJID). https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(19)30261-9/fulltext

  3. Salinas-Escudero, G., et al. (2023). Impact of an automated hand hygiene monitoring system on healthcare-associated infections at Hospital Infantil de México Federico Gómez. Frontiers in Public Health. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1117680/full

  4. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2004). Diarrheal illness in children attending child care. Emerging Infectious Diseases. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/11/04-0623_04_article

  5. Dahl, L. (2026). Care about the environment, but dismiss toxic chemicals in products as pseudoscience? Read this. The Environmental Health Brief (Substack).

The Environmental Health Brief
Care About the Environment, but Dismiss Clean Living as Pseudoscience? Read this.
Earth Week Edit »…
Read more
2 months ago · 6 likes · Lindsay Dahl

  1. Stone, P. W. (2009). Economic burden of healthcare-associated infections: an American perspective. Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research (via PubMed Central). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2827870/

  2. WAYAKIT Group. Corporate site.

https://sa.wayakit.com

  1. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

https://kaust.edu.sa

Note on currency: References #7 (CDC, 2004) and #9 (Stone, 2009) are older sources, kept here because they remain the canonical studies cited in subsequent literature. The specific figures may have shifted in magnitude, but the documented pattern still holds.

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]]><![CDATA[Foundational Paper 001 - What your water actually costs]]>https://www.aziulconnections.com/p/what-your-water-actually-costshttps://www.aziulconnections.com/p/what-your-water-actually-costsWed, 01 Apr 2026 13:04:04 GMTHighlights

  • In the GCC, your tap water feels free. It costs 25x more energy to run than water almost anywhere else on Earth.

  • The UN just declared water bankruptcy. Not a crisis. Something worse.

  • 300,000 barrels of oil burned daily: just to make Saudi Arabia’s drinking water.

  • 30 billion liters of wudu water flow every day. Most of the world doesn’t see the cost.

  • You don’t need guilt. You need the right lenses. Here they are.

👋 Hi, it’s Luisa Javier. Welcome to Aziul Connections ( 🌎🔬The Sustainable Systems Lab), where I study how sustainable systems are built for business, leadership, and life.

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Every morning I open the tap in my kitchen in KAUST.

The water comes out clear, instant, unremarkable. My son fills his glass. I start the coffee. The day begins. You probably do the same thing, wherever you are. The tap opens. The water runs. The day takes over.

What neither of us sees is the machine behind it.

The ritual you already know. Here is the cost behind it.

In the last article in this series, I measured the wudu, or the cleaning ritual Muslims do before prayer. The prophetic mudd — 0.6 liters — the amount the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, used for ritual purification. I asked what would happen if we applied that standard to a region where water does not exist in nature. Where every drop that comes out of your tap was once salt water pulled from the Red Sea or the Arabian Gulf, forced through membranes under enormous pressure, and delivered to your home through infrastructure that consumes a significant portion of this country’s daily energy production.

That article quantified the ritual. This one quantifies the cost.

There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, and most perform wudu at least three times a day. At the prophetic minimum of 0.6 liters per ablution, that is over 3 billion liters of water used for wudu alone, every single day. But in the previous article we found that most people use, on average, 10x more water, meaning 30 billion liters of water!

This is the equivalent amount of water of 12,000 olympic swimming pools of water every single day! To be honest, I don’t want to go over the annual calculation.

Most of that water in different parts of the world comes from rivers, reservoirs, and groundwater. It falls from the sky. It costs almost nothing to produce.

Here in the Gulf, it does not fall from the sky. 83% of the population of the Middle East and North Africa already lives under severe water scarcity. The Middle East operates 41.8% of the world’s entire desalination capacity. Qatar gets 99% of its drinking water from desalination. Kuwait and Bahrain, 90%. Oman, 86%. Saudi Arabia, 70% and UAE, 42%.

The world is no longer in a water crisis. It is in water bankruptcy.

In January 2026, the United Nations made something official that scientists had been building toward for years: global water bankruptcy.

The language matters. A crisis implies recovery. Bankruptcy implies irreversibility — systems that have been overdrawn past the point of return. Kaveh Madani, Director of the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, put it plainly: for much of the world, normal is gone. Andrew Curry, writing in Just Two Things, captured the distinction precisely: the checking account is empty, and the savings account is being drained.

“For much of the world, normal is gone.” — Kaveh Madani, Director, UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health

What does that mean for someone living in a place where normal never included fresh water to begin with?

It means the invisible cost was always there. We just never had a word for what happens when the bill finally comes due.

The number that changes how you see every tap

Here is the number I want you to remember. I worked it out during my Ph.D. in water desalination.

Producing one cubic meter of drinking water through seawater desalination in the Middle East requires approximately 5 kilowatt-hours of energy for a full plant at Gulf salinity levels. Treating the same cubic meter from a conventional surface water source requires roughly 0.2 kilowatt-hours.

That is a ratio of 25 times more energy. Per cubic meter. Every day. For every person in this region whose water arrives with no alternative.

Saudi Arabia consumes around 300,000 barrels of oil daily just to run its desalination plants — approximately 20 percent of the country’s total oil production. Not to power cities or factories. To manufacture the water that comes out of your tap.

When you open that tap, you are not turning on water. You are turning on an industrial process with no equivalent anywhere else on the planet.

Why your brain tells you water is free — and why that is the problem

I call this the lens problem.

The water looks the same. It feels the same. It costs almost nothing on your monthly bill, because governments here heavily subsidize the real price of production. So your brain registers it as free. Or close to it.

But the scientist in me cannot unsee what is behind it.

I have a thought experiment I shared recently that I cannot stop thinking about: what if, instead of water coming out of that tap, you could see what actually produced it? Not liters. Energy units. The barrel fractions. The infrastructure cost of manufacturing something that falls freely from the sky almost everywhere else in the world. Twenty-five times the energy of water that simply exists. Made invisible by a subsidized bill and a tap that always works.

“Most people who waste water are not careless. They are simply not wearing the right lenses.”

The one thing you can do before the water runs

So here is what I am asking.

The next time you open a tap — whether you are here in the Gulf, in Mexico City where the aquifer beneath the streets is collapsing at 25 centimeters per year, or anywhere else on this planet that the UN has now formally declared water bankrupt — take three seconds before the water runs.

Think about what it cost to get there.

Clarity, not guilt. Seeing, not alarm.

The world will not solve water bankruptcy through fear. It will solve it through people who finally see what the system has been hiding in plain sight. The invisible cost of water is only invisible because no one has handed you the lenses yet.

Now with this article, you have them.

Subscribe to Aziul Connections (The Sustainable Systems Lab)

Public lab studying sustainable systems across business, leadership, and life. Essays, experiments, field observations and case studies from a climate-tech founder (Dr. Luisa Javier) operating between LATAM and MENA. Aziul = Azul (the planet) + Luisa (backwards)

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About the author - Dr. Luisa Javier

Dr. Luisa Javier is a scientist and climate-tech entrepreneur across LATAM & MENA, focused on designing sustainable systems for business and society. She is the Founder and CEO of WAYAKIT Group and the author of **Aziul Connections.**

Aziul Connections is the public lab where I study how sustainable systems are built.

“I build sustainable living through WAYAKIT, and study the systems behind it through Aziul Connections.”

Thank you for reading or listening to this article, share it or leave a comment if you find this information useful!

Luisa

Connect with me

📩 luisa@aziulconnections.com

LinkedIn · Instagram · Facebook · Snapchat · TikTok

This is the second article in the World Water Day series at Aziul Connections. The first, Field Observation 004: The 0.6 Liter Water Rule, introduced the Mudd Test as a framework for measuring water use against its real constraints.

Sources:

*Center for Strategic and International Studies (2026). “Could Iran Disrupt the Gulf Countries’ Desalinated Water Supplies?” CSIS.*

*IEA (2026), “Wired for water: How electrification is transforming desalination”*

*Just Two Things by Andrew Curry, “4 February 2026: Water | AI”*

*Madani, K. (2026), Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. DOI: 10.53328/INR26KAM001*

*Park et al. (2020), “A comprehensive review of energy consumption of seawater reverse osmosis desalination plants,” Applied Energy 254, 113652. DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2019.113652*

*Plappally and Lienhard (2012), “Energy requirements for water production, treatment, end use, reclamation, and disposal,” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 16(7), 4818–4848. DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2012.05.022*

]]><![CDATA[Foundational Paper 000 - Sustainable Systems: The Framework Behind Everything I Build]]>https://www.aziulconnections.com/p/sustainable-systems-the-frameworkhttps://www.aziulconnections.com/p/sustainable-systems-the-frameworkSun, 01 Mar 2026 22:30:50 GMT

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Why this essay exists

People keep asking me a version of the same question:

Thanks for reading Aziul Connections! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

“How do you do it, Luisa?”

How do you balance motherhood, purpose, leadership, and the daily execution of building something real, without burning out or losing yourself?

For a long time, I answered with stories: I prioritize. I plan. I delegate. I pray. I adapt. All true. Still incomplete.

Because the more I tried to explain it, the more I realized I wasn’t describing a set of habits.

I was describing a method I’d been using for years without naming it.

I rely on systems. Not perfection. Not rigid routines. Systems that lower future effort, clear mental space, and keep things moving when life changes shape.

And since my work is rooted in sustainability (scientifically, operationally, and spiritually), I couldn’t talk about systems without asking the real question:

What makes them sustainable?

This essay is the foundation of everything I’ll publish here: the definition, the framework, and the lens I’ll use to document my own systems, and interview others about theirs.

What a “system” is

For most of my life, I didn’t use the word system. I just built them.

I built systems to study when I was a student, not because I was more disciplined than others, but because writing things down meant I could find things later without spending energy re-creating them. I built systems to manage my time when I was working full-time while studying.

Later, I built systems to run a biotechnology company across continents, where decisions had to keep moving even when I was asleep in another time zone.

Operating between Latin America and the Middle East made the gap impossible to ignore. In Mexico, trust runs through proximity. In Saudi Arabia, it runs through hierarchy, protocol, and long-term institutional alignment. When time zones and leadership norms pull execution apart, you either become the bottleneck, or you build structures that translate intent into action without your constant presence.

I didn’t see it clearly at the time, but what I was building was infrastructure, not of machines, but of continuity.

A system isn’t a checklist. It’s a structure that lets something keep functioning without you having to hold it together by hand.

Systems scientist Donella Meadows, in Thinking in Systems, defines a system as:

an interconnected set of elements organized in a way that achieves something.

She highlights three essential components:

  • Elements: the visible parts

  • Interconnections: how those parts influence one another

  • Purpose: what the system is designed to produce

That last part is the one that changes everything. Systems always produce something, whether you intended it or not. And once you take that seriously, you start seeing your life and your business differently:

  • A calendar system produces either clarity or overwhelm.

  • A leadership system produces either autonomy or dependence.

  • A business system produces either scalability or constant firefighting.

You can’t judge a system by how busy it looks. You judge it by what it reliably produces over time.

I understood this most clearly as WAYAKIT began to grow.

In the early years, I personally reviewed pricing decisions, technical validations, and operational approvals. At first, it felt like the responsible thing to do. But over time, something became obvious: the company wasn’t scaling at the speed of opportunity. It was scaling at the speed of my attention.

The hidden output of the system was dependence. So we changed the interconnections. We built pricing logic into tools. We documented decision frameworks. We created feedback loops so information could move without needing to pass through me every single time.

Nothing visibly “dramatic” happened overnight. But the output changed. Decisions sped up. Teams gained autonomy. And my role shifted from being the system itself to being the architect of it.

That’s what systems thinking did for me.

It moved me from asking:

What should I do next?

to asking:

What structure would make this work without me?

This is about continuity. It isn’t about doing more. It’s about designing conditions where the right things keep happening.

This newsletter exists to make those invisible structures visible, to understand the systems already shaping our lives, and to build new ones with intent.

Because once you start seeing systems, you realize something quietly unsettling:

You were never managing tasks. You were managing the structures that produce them.

What “sustainable” means here

I use “sustainable” in two layers: world sustainability and personal sustainability.

In its most widely accepted global meaning, the United Nations (via the Brundtland Commission) defines sustainable development as meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

In business language, John Elkington popularized the “triple bottom line,” often summarized as people, planet, profit (sometimes phrased as prosperity).

That world definition shaped my professional work. It sits behind WAYAKIT, behind my research in water sustainability, and behind every product we’ve brought to market.

But scaling across MENA and LATAM taught me something practical: systems that work beautifully in one environment can break in another. Regulations differ. Resource constraints differ. Even the meaning of urgency differs.

A system that worked in a lab in Saudi Arabia had to survive manufacturing realities in Mexico. A pricing model designed for industrial clients had to adapt to completely different market expectations across regions.

So sustainability, in practice, became about designing systems that could survive translation, across geography, culture, and infrastructure, without losing their core purpose.

And long before I used the word “sustainability” professionally, I was searching for it personally.

Because I learned, sometimes gently, sometimes through collapse, that a system can be efficient and still not be sustainable.

In 2017, parts of my personal life collapsed in ways I couldn’t control. For the first time, the systems that had always given me stability weren’t enough. And yet, the professional systems I had built, the routines of showing up, the structure of purpose, the discipline of execution, became the framework that helped me rebuild.

Receiving our first WAYAKIT award after coming back from a comma.

That experience rewired my definition. Sustainability stopped being only about environmental impact. It became about whether something could continue without destroying the person carrying it.

So for this newsletter, “sustainable” also means:

It keeps working without consuming the person running it.

Behavioral research shows that habits become automatic responses triggered by stable contexts, reducing the mental effort required to act.

Cognitive science further demonstrates that humans naturally “offload” thinking onto external systems (notes, tools, processes) to free cognitive capacity for higher-level decisions.

I’ve lived that.

Since high school, I developed systems for documenting information (first in notebooks, later digitally), so I could retrieve decisions, insights, and commitments without relying on memory alone.

In business, building pricing systems, operational frameworks, and decision protocols allowed me to scale WAYAKIT across continents without being present in every decision.

Each system, once built, gave something back: time, clarity, and mental space.

This is the bridge between personal and global sustainability. A sustainable system doesn’t only reduce environmental harm.

It reduces internal friction.

It doesn’t only protect future generations. It protects your ability to keep showing up. It allows value to persist beyond a single moment of effort.

So in Aziul Connections, I use the word sustainable in its fullest sense:

A system is sustainable when it sustains you, sustains others, and sustains value beyond you.

It serves people. It respects the planet. It sustains prosperity.

And just as important, it protects the resource that makes everything else possible:

your energy to continue building.

My definition of a sustainable system

This is the working definition I will refine publicly over time; through building companies, navigating life, and learning from others who have done the same:

A sustainable system is an interconnected set of elements, relationships, and rules designed to fulfill a purpose. It continues to function reliably over time by protecting the operator’s attention and energy, adapting to change, and generating net-positive value for people, planet, and prosperity.

What makes a system sustainable isn’t only that it continues. It’s how it continues, and what it preserves in the process.

Over time, I noticed that every system in my life, whether it’s managing information, leading a company, or protecting time with my son, has to satisfy two layers at once: one internal, one external.

The internal sustainability layer answers:

  • Does it make execution repeatable without draining my mental and emotional energy?

  • Does it allow decisions to happen without renegotiating them every day?

  • Does it reduce friction instead of multiplying it?

  • Does it create space for focus, creativity, and presence?

The best systems I’ve built do exactly that. Once they’re in place, they stop demanding attention. They keep continuity running quietly in the background, so I can expand into new challenges instead of maintaining old ones.

And the external sustainability layer answers:

  • Does it create value without exporting hidden costs to other people, the environment, or the future?

  • Does it empower others, or make them dependent?

  • Does it preserve resources, or quietly deplete them?

  • Does it scale responsibly, or accumulate invisible fragility?

This is where personal systems thinking meets global sustainability, because the same principle shows up at every scale.

A business model that requires constant human exhaustion is not sustainable. A leadership structure that centralizes every decision is not sustainable. A product that solves one problem while damaging ecosystems is not sustainable.

True sustainability exists where continuity, adaptability, and value align.

This definition now shapes how I design everything, from how WAYAKIT operates across continents, to how I protect time for reflection, to how I structure this newsletter itself.

Because ultimately, systems determine not only what we produce, but what we preserve. And once you see that, you stop optimizing for output alone. You start designing for endurance.

Now I can explain the framework behind it.

The Aziul TAPPPP framework

(Time, Adaptability, Purpose, People, Planet, Prosperity)

I evaluate every system through six filters: three that sustain the operator, and three that sustain the world. I use the acronym TAPPPP because it’s easy enough to remember, sharp enough to reveal what’s true, and flexible enough to apply across business, leadership, and life.

Internal sustainability filters

1. Time (T)

A sustainable system gives time back. Not by squeezing more minutes out of a day, but by reducing future effort through repeatability and automaticity.

That logic is supported by habit research: repetition in stable contexts can make behaviors increasingly automatic, which means they require less deliberation and less cognitive cost.

2. Adaptability (A)

A sustainable system doesn’t require perfect conditions. It still works when life changes.

In ecology, resilience is defined as the ability of a system to absorb disturbance and still maintain its core function. It doesn’t freeze. It adjusts.

I’ve seen this in my own life.

There were seasons when my schedule was predictable, and systems were easy to maintain. And then there were moments when everything changed at once: moving countries, becoming a mother, building a company from research, navigating personal loss. In those moments, rigid systems didn’t survive. The flexible ones did.

The systems that held weren’t the most complex. They were the simplest. They could shrink when needed, pause without breaking, and restart without drama.

A sustainable system isn’t one that never changes. It’s one that continues to support you, even when everything else shifts.

3. Purpose (P)

A sustainable system serves the mission, not the ego of the system.

This is where many high-achievers get trapped: they become loyal to structure instead of outcome. The system turns into something you serve, instead of something that serves you.

In this newsletter, a system is only “good” if it protects your ability to move toward what matters most. And the signal I watch for is mental space.

When your mind keeps reopening the same loops, you don’t expand, you fragment. Research on task switching shows that attention can “linger” on the previous task, reducing performance on the next one. Designing closure and boundaries isn’t aesthetic. It’s functional.

These three internal filters helped me build companies, navigate crises, and protect my attention. I also learned something else over time: not everything needs to be systematized. If something gets stuck again and again, I let it move. I structure what makes life easier and leave the rest in life’s hands. This triad keeps pointing me toward a fuller life: time for what matters, a clear purpose, and the flexibility to adapt.

Now, the external filters.

External sustainability filters

4. People (P)

I remember that, a long time ago, a potential investor asked me, “How many lives is your project helping?”

A sustainable system creates value for others, not only efficiency for me. This is where sustainability stops being personal productivity and starts becoming leadership.

I learned this most clearly while building WAYAKIT. In the early years, every operational improvement we made, simplifying production steps, redesigning packaging, standardizing formulations, didn’t just save me time. It made the work easier for our team. It reduced friction, training time, and mistakes. A system that only works because one person carries it is fragile. A system that strengthens other people becomes durable.

Strategists Michael Porter and Mark Kramer call this shared value: when business success and social progress reinforce each other. The most resilient systems are the ones where everyone involved benefits from their existence: employees, partners, customers, and communities.

Sustainability, in this sense, is not sacrifice. It is alignment.

5. Planet (P)

For me, “planet” was never theoretical. It’s why I entered science in the first place.

As an environmental scientist, I spent years studying water systems and resource constraints. The turning point came when I moved into industry and saw how many operational systems are designed for speed, not stewardship. Water wasted because it’s easier. Chemicals chosen because they’re cheaper. Processes repeated because “that’s how it’s always been done.”

Building WAYAKIT forced me to translate environmental intention into operational systems: formulations designed to reduce water consumption, concentrated products that reduce logistics impact, and processes that can scale without scaling harm.

Sustainability becomes real when it’s embedded into the system itself, when the responsible action becomes the default, not the exception.

This principle aligns with global sustainability frameworks, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which emphasize continuous improvement and systemic change, not one-time actions.

A sustainable system doesn’t depend on constant willpower to do the right thing. It makes the right thing the path of least resistance.

6. Prosperity (P)

A sustainable system must be able to sustain itself. That isn’t only money. It’s durability, royalties over time, and economic viability as proof the system can persist.

This was one of the hardest lessons for me as a founder. In the beginning, I believed impact alone was enough. But impact that depends entirely on personal sacrifice eventually collapses. It drains the person carrying it.

Prosperity is not only financial profit. It is durability. It is the ability of a system to generate enough value, economic, operational, or energetic, to continue existing without draining its operator.

In sustainability research, this is often described as sustainable value creation: models that improve environmental and social outcomes while remaining economically viable.

I’ve experienced this personally. The systems that lasted in my life, in business, health, and leadership, weren’t the ones that required constant heroic effort. They were the ones that, once designed well, started returning energy instead of consuming it.

Prosperity is not the opposite of sustainability. It’s proof the system can live beyond your constant intervention.

Prosperity matters because without it, the “system” becomes a donation of your life force.

What comes next

Up to this point, this is the foundation.

Not a productivity system. Not a life philosophy disconnected from execution. A lens I use to design companies, protect my attention, and build a life that can endure pressure, change, and responsibility.

For years, I thought systems were private tools. Something each person had to figure out alone, through friction, failure, and exhaustion.

But I’ve come to believe something else:

Some of the most impactful leaders I’ve met aren’t defined by how hard they work. They’re defined by the systems they’ve built, the ones that allow value to continue long after the moment of effort.

  • A founder who can scale without becoming the bottleneck.

  • A parent who protects presence despite responsibility.

  • A leader who builds organizations that function without constant control.

  • A person who protects their energy while expanding their impact.

Aziul Connections exists to document those designs. Over the past decade, many of those systems were forged while building between Latin America and the Middle East, environments that force clarity about what endures and what collapses under complexity.

Over time, I will share the systems I’ve built across business, geographies, leadership, motherhood, and personal evolution, and I will interview other builders to understand how their systems sustain them.

Not as prescriptions, but as patterns. Because once you see systems, you stop assuming everything must be carried through personal effort.

You begin to design continuity.

My hope is that this becomes a public library of sustainable systems, so you can borrow what fits, reshape what doesn’t, and stop rebuilding from scratch in isolation.

If this resonates with you, I invite you to be part of it.

Subscribe to follow the frameworks as they evolve. Reply and tell me what system you’re trying to build right now. Or share this with someone who is ready to stop carrying everything alone.

Because the future does not belong to those who can endure the most pressure. It belongs to those who can design systems that endure.

Welcome to Aziul.

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Frameworks for building sustainable systems in business, leadership, and life—grounded in science, entrepreneurship, and scaling impact across LATAM and MENA. Aziul is Azul + Luisa backwards: the planet I protect through sustainable systems.

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