If you have condominial sewerage (or any sewerage, for that matter) you have the opportunity to practise wastewater-fed agriculture – using treated wastewater to raise fish and/or (but preferably ‘and’) irrigate crops. In urban areas this is termed ‘wastewater-fed urban agriculture’. IDRC Canada has published many reports and books on urban agriculture (UA) in general and wastewater-fed UA in particular – for example, Wastewater Use in Irrigated Agriculture: Confronting the Livelihood and Environmental Realities (2004) and, just out this month, Wastewater Irrigation and Health: Assessing and Mitigating Risk in Low-income Countries (though the hyperlinks to the chapters are not yet in – in the meantime there’s the pdf of the whole book here; hard copies can be purchased from Earthscan). See also Urban Agriculture and, more generally, Wastewater Use in Agriculture and Wastewater Use in Aquaculture.
The World Health Organization has published Guidelines for the Safe Use of Wastewater, Excreta and Greywater in agriculture and aquaculture (3rd edition, 2006).
Remember: “Wastewater is too valuable to waste”.
About Me
- Duncan Mara
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.