A New Paradigm for Urban Sanitation - An Urgent Need

Addressing the urban sanitation crisis: Time for a radical shift

SUBMITTED BY MARTIN GAMBRILL ON WED, 11/16/2016

Co-authors:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – Jan Willem Rosenboom
The University of Leeds – Barbara Evans
Emory University – Christine Moe & Eduardo Perez
The World Bank – Sophie Trémolet, Valérie Sturm, Clémentine Stip
WaterAid – Andrés Hueso
Plan International – Darren Saywell

Children in Maputo, Mozambique
Photo credit:
Isabel Blackett/The World Bank

A successful city is economically and culturally vibrant, healthy, safe, clean and attractive to business and tourism, and provides quality of life to its citizens. This vision is appealing but remains hard to realize as developing cities have to cope with changing demographics and climate with limited financial and human resources. The sustainable development goals have given a new impetus for cities to be inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable (SDG11), ensure citizens’ health and wellbeing (SDG3) and secure access to sustainable water and sanitation services (SDG6).

World Toilet Day on November 19th is the opportunity to remind ourselves of a few facts and propose a set of guiding principles for a renewed and revitalized urban sanitation agenda.

Many cities struggle to deal with the most basic municipal task of managing human excreta. Some are effectively “drowning” in human waste. Urban population growth continuously outpaces gains in improved sanitation access and, globally, nearly one billion people live in urban slums with poor or no sanitation. Only 26% of urban excreta is deemed to be safely managed. The results? Environmental degradation, endemic disease leading to mortality and morbidity, especially among children, poor school attendance and performance, low productivity, constraints on the delivery of essential urban services such as housing, transport, safe water and drainage, and, ultimately, limits on economic growth and urban development. In short, a silent crisis that impedes the realization of the urban transformation framed in SDG11.

Urban sanitation has a fundamental role to play in achieving the SDG goals identified above. Business as usual will fail to deliver the kind of sanitation that underpins the envisioned urban transformation, by operating at too small a scale and focusing on infrastructure alone rather than on city-wide solutions. What is required is a radical shift in mindsets and practices towards an urban sanitation approach that impacts political priorities, funding, planning, design, management and governance.

Mobile desludging tank being wheeled out of an alley in the
city of Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo credit: Jan Willem Rosenboom

This radical shift will require the engagement of all stakeholders and a political transformation that touches all citizens, rich and poor, informal and formal, to facilitate the roll out of universal urban sanitation services. This is critical not only for reasons of equity, and to respond to the human right to sanitation, but also because the consequences of inadequate sanitation eventually affect everyone, as excreta-related pathogens spread easily across dense urban environments.

To make progress, urban development professionals and stakeholders need to better understand how sanitation impacts the functions and form of the city and how it supports economic development and promotes equity. To achieve sustainable, equitable and safe management of excreta for the whole city, sanitation sector professionals must transform their thinking and practices to deploy both old and new solutions in smarter ways.

We, from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The University of Leeds, Emory University, WaterAid, Plan International and The World Bank, have come together as a group of practitioners to galvanize this agenda by sharing conversations globally and mobilizing contributions from decision-makers and other practitioners across disciplines.

We propose that this renewed urban sanitation agenda should aim to:

• Embed sanitation within the framework of urban governance and municipal services provision.
• Establish clear roles and responsibilities, with accountability and transparency.
• Provide ‘safe management’ of excreta throughout the sanitation chain – for both onsite sanitation and sewers – to ensure separation of fecal contamination from people across the whole city.
• Focus on outcomes rather than technologies – allowing for diversity of solutions and approaches.
• Base decisions on secure operational budgets being available (including for operation and maintenance).
• Facilitate progressive realization, building on what is already in place.
• Commit resources to training city leaders and technicians of the future to solve complex problems rather than deliver predetermined solutions.

 On this World Toilet Day, we invite you to join us in responding to this shared responsibility.

Related:

• Toolkit: Tools for diagnosing urban sanitation challenges
• Blog: Targeting urban sanitation: Looking behind aggregated city-level data
• Blog: Fecal Sludge Management: the invisible elephant in urban sanitation
• Blog: 5 lessons to manage fecal sludge better 
• Blog: A tale of two cities: how cities can improve fecal sludge management 

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Submitted on the water blog last week but important enough to be very widely distributed, including in the more fortunate regions where clean water and effective sanitation is the norm.

Most Australians live with good to excellent water quality and decent effective sanitation.   That is not the situation in many regions of the world, where urban sanitation is, well,............. bloody awful! [ in the Australian vernacular].

As urban density rises especially in poorer countries urban sanitation seems to decline.  It does need reversing to allow a rise in dignity and health for the less fortunate.

World Toilet Day 2016 - November 19 was a time for reflection and change.

UN World Toilet Day

The 19th of November marks the third annual UN World Toilet Day, an important opportunity to promote global efforts to achieve universal access to sanitation by 2030. 

This year, World Toilet Day is focusing on the link between sanitation and nutrition, drawing the world’s attention to the importance of toilets in supporting better nutrition and improved health. 

Lack of access to clean drinking water and sanitation, along with the absence of good hygiene practices, are among the underlying causes of poor nutrition.

It is okay if in the developed world.........we take toilets for granted.  They are not so ubiquitous in the developing world, but vital, especially more so for women and children.

Toilets have a significant effect on children’s health and nutrition; access to toilets can help children reach their full physical and mental potential. The inverse, however, is also true and the absence of a toilet can have profound implications. 

Consider the life of a child who lives in a village with poor sanitation. They go outside; they play in the same field where people defecate; they put their fingers in their mouths. They might not be aware of what contaminants are on their fingers.

Considering such things is not the job of a young child but it is important for his/her family, village, governments and the development community. 

We have a growing body of knowledge of the multi-generational and cyclical effects of what happens when a child’s environment is contaminated with feces. 

The UN estimates that 2.4 billion people still lack access to improved sanitation facilities, nearly 1 billion of which practice open defecation......think........toilets - are vital.

Sanitation Pays Off - BIG TIME for Development in Asia

Globally, the sanitation Millennium Development Goal target is well off track. 

However, many countries in Southeast Asia have made substantial progress, although a number of them will not reach the sanitation MDG target by 2015.

 Many countries have recently revised their sanitation strategies in order to rapidly scale up sanitation and aim for universal access by 2030.

According to a new study from the Water Global Practices Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), sanitation has been shown to have significant economic and social returns in the six countries studied (Cambodia, Yunnan province of China, Indonesia, Lao PDR, the Philippines, and Vietnam) and benefits in both urban and rural settings exceed costs in almost all cases. 

The Economic Assessment of Sanitation Interventions in Southeast Asia found that all sanitation interventions examined have benefits that exceed costs, when compared with “no sanitation facility.” Economic benefits of sanitation are at least five times higher than economic costs in rural areas and at least three times higher for urban areas. 

Other key findings include:

- In rural areas, the most basic sanitation type, the pit latrine, had returns of at least five times its costs in all but one country, Cambodia. Across both wet and dry pit latrines, the returns are highest in Lao PDR at over eight times.

- In urban areas, pit latrines remain a feasible, affordable, and efficient sanitation option in some settings where density is low. Septic tanks were also found to be economically viable in all countries, with economic returns of around two or more per unit spent.

In all countries and for most sanitation technologies, health benefits and time savings accounted for the majority of the overall benefits. 

Some intangible benefits not quantifiable  from the above estimates were also shown to be important to households, including dignity, comfort, prestige, security, gender equality, household cleanliness, and aesthetics of the community environment. Because of inter-personal variation in responses, it was difficult to present population level averages for these intangible benefits. 

The benefits of reduced water pollution from improved fecal sludge or sewage management were not fully counted for those interventions that reduced release of fecal matter into the environment because of the methodological difficulties and data constraints involved in such valuations.

The report, which is part of the second phase of the Economics of Sanitation Initiative (ESI) launched initially in East Asia in 2007, provides sanitation decision makers with compelling evidence that directly compares the costs and benefits of alternative sanitation options across multiple contexts and countries.

Read the blog from Guy Hutton: "Why choosing the preferred sanitation solution should be more like grocery shopping."

For more information, please visit www.wsp.org

World Toilet Day - 2014

It seems simple for those in western society...........the use of a decent toilet.  It is NOT that way for many in developing countries, and particularly in India.  Simple sanitation and hand washing associated with it is a critical issue in developing areas and reducing simple illnesses.

Today marks the second annual UN World Toilet Day, an important opportunity to promote global efforts to achieve universal access to sanitation by 2030. 

With a focus on equality and dignity, this year, World Toilet Day aims to highlight sanitation as a global development priority, especially for women and girls who must compromise their dignity and put their safety at risk when lack of access to sanitation forces them to defecate in the open.

Sanitation impacts multiple sectors of development, but the connection with gender equality is particularly important.

As outlined in a blog by World Bank Group Senior Director for Gender Caren Grown and Senior Director for Water Junaid Ahmad, advancing equality for women in developing countries is not only the right thing to do, it makes good economic sense. 

The relationship between gender equality and sanitation and water services is reciprocal. Just as investing in sanitation and water services benefits gender equity, improvements in gender equity can meanwhile advance improved sanitation and water services.

Ending poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity - the World Bank Group’s twin corporate goals - is possible only if we continue pressing to fully understand such obstacles to gender equity and service delivery.

Better Sanitation SAVES Lives and Money

Open defecation costs $US260b globally

The UN is calling for the end of open defecation as it costs about $US260 billion worldwide. Source: AAP

THE United Nations says one billion people worldwide are still practising open defecation, which cost of billions of dollars annually due to illness, death and loss of productivity.

The practice spreads diseases like diarrhoea, dysentery, hepatitis A and typhoid through entire communities, the UN officials said, costing about $US260 billion ($A281 billion) worldwide.

It has kept women under the threat of harassment, violence and rape, and has forced young girls to abandon education at puberty.

"It is high time to talk openly about open defecation, and it is high time to bring it to an end," UN Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson said during the launch of the world body's sanitation campaign in New York. "Let us remember that the first step to solve any problem is talking about it." The practice is most widespread in poor and developing countries.

Some countries, including Vietnam and Bangladesh, where more than 30 per cent of their populations relieved themselves in open areas in the early 1990s, ended the practice entirely in 2012.

However, open defecation lingers in dozens of other countries.

In India an estimated 600 million people - more than half the population - defecate without using a toilet or latrine. 

"If we could end open defecation in just 10 countries, we would see the numbers of people affected drop by 80 per cent," Eliasson said, noting that the end of the practice could mean a direct reduction of 36 per cent in deaths due to diarrhoea for children under five.

I have written several prior posts about water and sanitation, in developing economies, as a vital for removing poverty and also empowering women especially.  It freaked me the first time I encountered it - which was in Africa - in the mid 1980s.  Hard to really believe what I was seeing.

While progress is being made - can we do more.........much more!

It seems simple - provide public toilets, but in some areas little seems to happen.  When the cost to society is so high - US$ 260 billion - a solution needs to be achieved.

We need to put more money into some of these simple things.  It does pay off!

[ some of this sourced via AAP]

Toilets - What Are They Worth?

As they say........shit happens!   But where it happens is important to many.

In developed areas we take toilets for granted.  Many do not have them around the world and there is a society cost.  A toilet is a major development issue in many countries.

And it can be especially important for women and teenage girls even more so than men.

The infographic shows this clearly.  Combine this issue with lack of opportunities, or failure, to wash hands to prevent and improve disease management, even in western societies is also relevant.

Simple stuff really.  And it needs support to happen.  It shocked me to see people toileting in public areas because there were no toilets, while working in some developing countries - an issue that seems so simple to remedy.

The infographic may not be as clear as needed - try here if you need to see it better - http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/08/30/whats-a-toilet-worth-infographic

Less Water Use Reduces Energy Too

Water use and water loss is a major energy cost in many countries.

If just 1% of US homes replaced older, inefficient toilets with dual flush models, the country would save more than 38 million kWh of electricity, the equivalent of 43,000 households’ monthly electrical supply.

While in Australia, dual flush and reduced flush toilets are very common, they are much less common in other countries. As an example, 25 years ago most Australian toilets were single flush, 12L per flush. Best models today are 6L/3L flush with a redesigned efficiently flushed pan, or the more common 9L/4.5L dual flush models. Practically, volumes less than these levels can create congestion problems in sewer lines as the liquids level has diminished so much..........but most countries are nowhere close to the reduced flush volumes now common in Australia.

Big water use reductions are possible, and an important issue, rarely considered is that less water used means much less energy is used. Think electricity for pumping and purifying water as the most obvious point.

Solving leakage is also important in reducing energy use, as a side benefit of reducing water losses. Same issues as above.

Switching to dual flush low volume toilets is a big factor in driving reducing energy use.

More information here -http://www.waterefficiency.net/march-april-2011/detecting-the-unaccountable-1.aspx

Separation Toilet for Liquids and Solids - Practical or Not?

Europeans rally behind the 'NoMix-tech' toilet
by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore


The NoMix toilet, which rather appropriately collects urine in the front and faeces in the back, has gained wide support by consumers throughout seven countries in Europe as a means of reducing pollution and conserving water, according to a new paper by scientists in Switzerland.

"NoMix" toilets, collect urine and faeces separately.

The just-publicized article, which calls on authorities to push for early adoption of the high-tech toilet, appears in the semi-monthly journal Environmental Science & Technology by ACS Publications.

Of the 2,700 people surveyed in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark, 80 percent say they support the idea behind the technology, and between 75 and 85 percent report that the design, hygiene, smell, and seat comfort of the NoMix toilets equal that of conventional ones.

Moreover, roughly 85 percent say they are open to the idea of using stored urine as fertilizer.
Researchers Judit Lienert and Tove Larsen write that the toilet collects urine separately, with the main advantage being that urine contains 80 percent of the nitrogen and 50 percent of the phosphorus that arrives at wastewater treatment plants. Those two elements trigger such things as algae blooms that can enter waterways and threaten fish.

Apparently, a full decade into the 21st century, the rather simple NoMix model is a relatively novel technology whose acceptance (beyond the NoMix-loving Swiss) had not been scientifically measured until now.

partially sourced from www.news.com
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This all sounds wonderful, except that in countries like Australia where low flow units are common, it is already an issue that total liquid flows down the sewer pipes can be too low for effective effluent transfer. That is, liquid is needed to get the waste from your place to the treatment location.

Maybe in hilly Switzerland it all goes downhill..........

These systems sound wonderful, but practical issues like that above need to be considered too.

There are systems that use on site composting with liquids separation........that would be a suitable option too, that avoids waste transfer. There are many other options, and most are practical and fit in with existing technology.

One of these is the Gough Hybrid Toilet. A low flow unit originally designed for small island communities with poor water supply, it has also been extensively used in toilet facilities designed for roadside and resort use in remote areas, as well as holiday homes or in areas with low water supplies. On site treatment is used, the output is predominantly liquid and can be reused for irrigation. See www.gough.com.au

The concept of better toilets is not new, but is a separation model the best option? Not always the ideal would be my view, and there are many options.

The current Australian concept of a dual option, low volume flush [ commonly 6L/3L with a suitable pan design] would seem a simple solution when combined with low health risk effluent treatment and recycling.