Ecological Sanitation: Background and Vision
Approximately half of humanity lacks any kind of sanitation. The situation is unlikely to change soon if conventional approaches are continually promoted. With rapid urbanisation, population growth, growing income disparities and increasing water scarcity, conventional approaches are becoming increasingly too costly, too complex, or just plain technically inappropriate. In addition to a changing world affecting sanitation solutions, conventional sanitary approaches are leading to other problems. Underlying the conventional approach to sanitation is an assumption that human excreta are a waste suitable only for disposal, and the conventional technologies are designed to dispose of excreta. These linear approaches fail to recycle nutrients, to prevent pollution or to protect health. Thus, surface and ground water become contaminated and the resulting soil infertility leads to costly measures and pollution. Because conventional approaches are not available to half of humanity, high rates of infectious disease and infant mortality rates continue to exist.
The overall goal of EcoSanRes is to create a global confidence in ecological sanitation as a trustworthy, affordable and sustainable alternative for design of sanitation systems. This requires a new understanding of sanitation, a holistic system based on healthy ecosystems. Residual material is recycled and reused as part of an ecocycle process. External inputs into the system and “wastes” that exit the system are reduced to a minimum or eliminated. Very little water or no water is used. Excreta are processed and rendered safe, close to the point of excretion, pollution is minimized, protecting ground and surface water, and nutrients and carbon are returned to land and made productive, which implies closing the loop. The holistic and ecological approach becomes safe and non-polluting. It can be gender and culturally acceptable; economically feasible; environmentally sustainable; and protecting and preserving the local ecosystem.
Healthy and better-nourished individuals may be an immediate benefit of such systems. It can also provide and generate employment through the provision of services to implement and sustain the systems. These factors contribute toward viable communities, whether urban or rural, and contribute towards the alleviation of poverty. Attaining the vision requires a change in how people think about sanitation and how it is integrated into the rest of society.
SanRes 1993-2002
The Sida-funded SanRes Programme has been managed by WKAB (Uno Winblad) from 1993 to 2001. The aims of the SanRes programme were:
1. to promote the development of affordable and replicable sanitation systems for urban and rural households in the third world,
2. to establish, in selected countries, a local capacity for R&D on sanitation, and
3. to facilitate South-South collaboration in the field of applied sanitation research.
Over the past 9 years the SanRes Programme has supported ecological sanitation projects in El Salvador, Mexico, Bolivia, South Africa, Uganda, Vietnam and China. (Ecological sanitation is defined as 'sanitation systems based on preventing pollution, destroying pathogenic organisms and recycling human excreta'.) A number of international seminars/conferences plus a number of national/local workshops and training courses have been arranged, culminating in the First International Conference on Ecological Sanitation, Nanning, November 2001.
The Programme has so far been involved in relatively small-scale projects in rural areas. The great success in China, particularly in Guangxi Province, indicates that the ecosan concept is ready for urban applications. It is first of all in urban areas that we badly need alternatives to conventional sanitation. All around the world there are fast growing small and medium-sized towns where most households have no access to a hygienic sanitation system. (In China there are 47,000 such towns with a total population more than 200 million.) The municipal economy does not allow heavy investments in pipe networks, pumping stations and treatment plants and many towns are critically short of water. For such towns ecological sanitation systems based upon decentralized management of human excreta and household refuse could be a solution.
