I’ve just bought and read the book Sustainable Wastewater Management in Developing Countries: New Paradigms and Case Studies from the Field by Carsten Laugesen and Ole Fryd with Hans Brix and Thammarat Koottatep (published this year by ASCE Press – ASCE is the American Society of Civil Engineers). It’s quite expensive (USD 75), so is it any good?
Well, on balance, ‘No’, though it does have a few good bits. Why do I say this? Because (a) there’s much too much emphasis on wastewater treatment (and mostly on constructed wetlands, as might be expected with Professors Brix and Koottatep as contributing authors); (b) there’s far too little emphasis on wastewater collection – simplified sewerage is mentioned, but not correctly (Figure 3-3 is labelled “A simplified sewerage system”, but it shows a settled sewerage system; Figure 3-4 is better: it correctly shows a “condominium sewerage system”); and (c) there’s nothing on design.
ASCE Press says the book “will urge practitioners, decision makers, and researchers to approach these systems in new ways that are practical, innovative, and − best of all − sustainable.” I don’t think so. I think they’ll all end up very confused.
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.