waste water – David South Consulting

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

The task is huge: 2.6 billion people, or 41 percent of the world’s population, is without access to basic sanitation. As a result, most have to make do and defecate or urinate wherever they can. In crowded urban areas, the result is an unpleasant source of disease and filth that fouls living spaces and sickens or kills many people.

In Indian cities, between one-quarter and one-half of the population, mostly slum-dwellers, has inadequate or no provision for sanitation.

Many government-built communal toilet blocks are in a sad state. They are overburdened by queues of people that can stretch a mile-long in the mornings. They can also be too expensive for many slum dwellers. Often government-built toilet blocks are in disrepair after just three months, and people return to defecating in the streets.

In 2008, the International Year of Sanitation (http://esa.un.org/iys/), more than 330 million people in India do not have access to proper sanitation facilities. And in the case of the remote town of Musiri in Tamil Nadu state, many residents relieve themselves on river banks, leading to infectious diseases like diarrhoea.

But an ingenious scheme is keeping streets clean and people relieved. Rather than viewing human waste as an expensive problem and annoyance, poor residents are being paid up to a dollar a month to use public toilets. By paying people to use the toilets, the government avoids having to run campaigns to get people to change their habits.

“In fact, many of us started using toilets for urination only after the ecosan (ecological sanitation) toilets were constructed in the area,” S. Rajasekaran, a truck cleaner, to The Times of India.

The urine is being collected to be used as a crop fertilizer by the state’s agricultural university (http://www.tnau.ac.in/ ). About 150 residents use the eco-sanitation toilet daily. It is designed to collect faeces as well: it too is used as fertilizer.

“We’re motivating people to know the value of their urine,” Marathi Subburaman, who came up with the novel idea, told CNN. “The urine that is collected goes into fields for paddy crops, and of course the faeces becomes good compost in a matter of months.”

Subburaman’s non-profit Society for Community Organization and People’s Education (SCOPE) has teamed up with Tamil Nadui Agricultural University and are studying how much urine is needed to fertilize a field.

“Next year, we can install urine banks so we can sell the urine to farmers,” he said.

The locals are given cards and each trip is recorded. At the end of the month, the cards are handed in and the money collected.

The average amount paid out is based on the assumption most people need to go twice a day.

If some get cheeky and try to make more money from pretending they need to go to the toilet, there is a solution: “If they ask to go three, four times a day, then something’s wrong,” Subburaman said. “We ask them to go to a doctor.”

Another successful model is the Indian NGO SPARC (Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres) (http://www.sparcindia.org/). SPARC is an Indian NGO established in Mumbai in 1984 that began working with women pavement dwellers.

It has been designing and building toilet blocks in Indian cities, bringing access to toilets and washing facilities to hundreds of thousands of poor urban Indians. It has built toilet blocks for 400,000 people in eight Indian cities. It trains community groups to build, manage and maintain the toilet blocks. It has also proven that local groups can take on the management and costs of providing toilet facilities.

Resources

World Toilet Organization: The global non-profit organization committed to improving toilet and sanitation conditions. Website: http://www.worldtoilet.org
World Toilet College: Established in 2005, the World Toilet College (WTC) started as a social enterprise, with the belief that there is a need for an independent world body to ensure the best practices and standards in toilet design, cleanliness, and sanitation technologies are adopted and disseminated through training. Website: http://www.worldtoilet.org/ourwork3.asp
Official website for the 2008 International Year of Sanitation. Website: http://esa.un.org/iys/
Waste has expert knowledge on domestic solid and liquid waste management and sanitation issues. Its website offers a comparison of designs and methods for toilets. Website: http://www.ecosan.nl/page/353

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.

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https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/10/18/indian-initiatives-to-make-travel-safer-for-women/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/10/25/indian-toilet-pioneer-champions-good-ideas/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/10/18/indians-fighting-inflation-with-technology/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/11/18/toilet-malls-make-going-better/

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© David South Consulting 2023

Urban Farmers Gain from Waste Water

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

The global food crisis continues to fuel food price inflation and send many into hunger and despair. Around the world, solutions are being sought to the urgent need for more food and cheaper food. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called for food production to increase 50 percent by 2030 just to meet rising demand – and right now there are 862 million people undernourished (FAO).

One fast-growing solution is bringing farming to urban and semi-urban spaces, where the majority of the world’s population now lives.

Urban farmers can take advantage of their close proximity to consumers, keeping costs down and profits up. They can also solve one of agriculture’s enduring problems – where to find water for irrigation by using existing waste water. Waste water is plentiful in urban environments, where factories usually pump out waste water into streams, rivers and lakes.

The amount of urban farmed agriculture is still small, about 10 percent of the world’s agricultural production, but is a potential growth area if handled well. In 53 cities surveyed by the International Water Management Institute, 1.1 million farmers – some 200 million worldwide – are now using recycled or waste water to irrigate their crops.

In Accra, Ghana, more than 200,000 people depend on food grown with wastewater. In Pakistan, a full quarter of the grown vegetables use wastewater.

The use of waste water comes with its ups and downs. While the World Health Organization rightfully points out that waste water can be a source of disease and pollution, cities also face a dilemma: diverting fresh water to irrigate crops means less for people to drink. Out of the 53 cities surveyed by the International Water Management Institute, 85 percent dumped their raw sewage and wastewater into streams and lakes. With this in mind, the WHO has altered its stance on wastewater, and now supports its use for irrigating farmland as long as all efforts are made to treat wastewater and that people are warned to thoroughly wash food before eating it.

Pay Drechsel, who heads the IWMI’s research division based in Accra, Ghana, studying safe and productive use of low-quality water, says sophisticated systems to use waste water have developed in Vietnam, China and India, “where this practice has been going on for centuries.”

“People know how to avoid health risks, like thorough cooking of vegetables,” he said. “In Vietnam and China, waste from households (fecal waste, solid waste and wastewater from household use) have always been effectively recycled in ‘closed systems’ at a household level where the waste/nutrients are recycled into the food chain and so return for human consumption.”

Drechsel cites examples like Calcutta, where a large wetland is being used for treating and recycling wastewater for beneficial uses such as fish farming. In Northern Ghana, fecal sludge from septic tanks is spread on fields that are later used to grow cereals.

“The risk for the consumer is extremely low, a waste product is productively recycled, the farmer has a good harvest and the city gets rid of their waste,” Drechsel said. “A multiple win-win situation.

“Depending on the local situations such models can be widely used, provided they are documented and the risk factors are controlled,” he added.

Farmers use various methods to reduce the risk of contamination, including drip irrigation where the water does not touch the crop.

The risks for both farmers and consumer can be managed with the right protocols. For farmers, Drechsel recommends wearing of rubber boots and careful hand washing to avoid skin diseases. He points out that these farmers usually make more money than those who do not use waste water, and thus can afford the extra cost of precautionary measures, like de-worming tablets. They can quickly get out of poverty by using this water.

For consumers, the risk is from diarrhoea, typhus or cholera if raw food is eaten unwashed or poorly washed. The best solution is to turn to the WHO’s guidelines and proven local practices and tested techniques developed by researchers.

“Here more awareness creation on invisible risks through pathogens is needed. Perception studies in West Africa showed that nearly all households wash vegetables but they target visible dirt. Thus, the methods used are not effective. Best would be therefore a combination of risk reducing interventions from farm to fork, as none alone is 100 percent efficient. This is also what the new WHO guidelines promote: a flexible approach, reducing in each country the health risks as far as it is possible and feasible.”

Drechsel sees an opportunity for water treatment plants to seize: “What is missing so far is a ‘design for reuse.’ If treatment plants would be designed to serve farmers they could be less sophisticated and easier to maintain. Farmers could be involved in this, maybe a win-win situation.

“The environment benefits too. Spreading wastewater over fields, and allowing it to leach back through the soil into local waterways, turns out to be a reasonable way to purify it. The process filters out all the organic contaminants, and much of the nitrogen and phosphates that would otherwise contribute to algal blooms and dead zones further downstream. It is certainly preferable to dumping wastewater straight into the nearest big river or lake.”

Published: September 2008

Resources

Vertical farming, where hothouses are piled one on top of the other, is an option being promoted as a solution to the food needs of urban dwellers.
Website: http://www.verticalfarm.com/
Extensive photographs of vertical farm project concepts by Chris Jacobs in cooperation with the grandfather of skyscraper farm concepts: Dr. Dickson Despommier of Columbia University. His ideal: all-in-one eco-towers would actually produce more energy, water (via condensation/purification) and food than their occupants would consume. His mission: to gather architects, engineers, economists and urban planners to develop a sustainable and high-tech wonder of ecological engineering.
Website: weburbanist.com
Urban Gardening News, a news service providing a review of daily news targeting everyone involved in planning & practicing alternative farming in cities. Great updates on how things are progressing across the South.
Website: http://www.urbanagriculture-news.com