Urban EcoSan in Erdos

Word is out, but not yet in print or e-print, that the much acclaimed Erdos Eco-Town project in China (see blog of 18 April 2008), supported by SIDA, the Stockholm Environment Institute and its EcoSanRes project, has been closed down by the Chinese as it was just too complicated and the householders, especially the women, didn’t like it at all. No surprise here then – after all, there’s water and sawdust going into each house, and dehydrated faeces, urine and greywater all coming out in separate streams. See the EcoSan photos on Flickr if you need convincing.

“Much acclaimed”? Well, it has been – see:
Sweden-China Erdos Eco-Town Project (EcoSanRes Factsheet #11, 2008)
Introduction to the China-Sweden Erdos Eco-Town Project (GTZ, 2006)

I think the world, especially the EcoSan world, deserves a full explanation, so over to you guys at SEI (and we’d like to know the costs please).

Local radio advocacy

Here’s a heartening story from India on the BBC News site yesterday: Radio boost for marginalised women. It seems to me that this kind of initiative could easily be adopted for water and sanitation advocacy to support CLTS and India’s Total Sanitation Campaign (of the 1.2 billion open defecators in the world in 2006 over half − 56% − live in India).

EcoSan again ...

I’ve just been reading Study for Financial and Economic Analysis of Ecological Sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa − Final Synthesis Report produced by Hydrophil and Atkins (April 2009). It compares the costs (in net present value terms) of VIP latrines, EcoSan toilets and conventional sewerage in urban areas in Burkina Faso, South Africa and Uganda. It’s interesting but it doesn’t attempt to estimate the costs of simplified sewerage. However, there are some cost data from South Africa in Sanitation for a Healthy Nation: Sanitation Technology Options (DWAF, 2002), which gives capital costs of ZAR 600−3000 for single-pit VIP latrines, ZAR 3000−4000 for eThekwini latrines, ZAR 2500−3000 for simplified sewerage, and ZAR 6000−7000 for conventional sewerage. [If you lived in a high-density low-income urban community in South Africa, which would you choose?]

So we can’t conclude much, if anything, from the Hydrophil/Atkins report about what are the best sanitation options in low-income high-density urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa − and that’s a real pity.

Rio de Janeiro

I spent last Saturday looking at low-cost sewerage schemes in the state of Rio de Janeiro with my good friend (and colleague for over 25 years) Augusto Sérgio Guimarães. We went to the town of Paracambi, located in the flat lands just below the mountains separating the states of Rio and São Paulo − so the well-known orographic effect is active and, when it rains, it rains very heavily and parts of the town often become flooded. Two solutions were tried. One was to collect the all the wastewater discharges into the local stream in a sanitary sewer running along one side of the stream (all the discharges were on this side), treat the wastewater in a septic tank and anaerobic filter, the effluent from which went into the stream; stormwater continued to be discharged directly into the stream − not necessarily the ‘best’ solution but certainly a ‘good’ one and at least the stream wasn’t receiving totally untreated wastewater any more. The other was an innovative low-cost combined sewerage scheme: both domestic wastewater and stormwater go into the same sewer and into a septic tank and anaerobic filter (with the effluent going into the stream), but during intense rain the septic tank and anaerobic filter are by-passed and the combined wastewater goes directly to the stream.

In one part of Paracambi we also saw something else very interesting: a badly designed conventional sewerage scheme. Why badly designed? Well, it was designed only for domestic wastewater but most households (which had no problems before the scheme was put in) discharge rainwater from the roofs into the sewer − so, when it rains, the sewers overflow into the street! Hardly an improvement. The engineers who designed the scheme just hadn’t realised what the householders were doing and so, in ignorance, designed a scheme which simply made matters worse. A lesson for all of us: work with the people and take the local situation into account.

Waste stabilization ponds

Well, this week I’ve been in Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil, at the International Water Association’s international specialist conference on waste stabilization ponds − a low-cost but highly efficient way to treat wastewater (details here). What a week! Very good conference, very good crowd of people (some of whom I only meet at these events, so it’s good to catch up with them), and excellent Brazilian food! Wastewater treatment is part of sanitation − if you have low-cost sewerage, you need low-cost wastewater treatment, and waste stabilization ponds are the best way to treat wastewater at the least cost. You can collect the biogas from anaerobic ponds and generate electricity (and maybe earn some carbon credits). It’s also possible, although more difficult and more expensive, to harvest the algae from high-rate algal ponds and make algal biodiesel − but this is likely to take a decade or two before it’s commercially viable.

Sanitation choices in the real world

The other night I met up with Rose George, the perspicacious author of The Big Necessity who’s recently moved to Leeds, for a quick drink. Naturally enough we talked about sanitation and she asked at one point what I’d recommend and why. This set me thinking and I have to say that, if we are to have any chance of attaining universal sanitation provision in the relatively near future (and remember it has to be ‘adequate’, not just ‘improved’, sanitation), then we need to be pretty clear about the sanitation systems we can actually use. So I reckon it has to be something like this:

A. High-density urban areas: simplified/condominial sewerage, low-cost combined sewerage, or SPARC-style community-managed sanitation blocks.

B. Medium-density urban and rural areas: eThekwini latrines (properly called ‘urine-diverting alternating twin-vault ventilated improved vault latrines’ or ‘UD-VIVs’ for short), simplified/condominial sewerage or low-cost combined sewerage, though alternating twin-pit VIPs and PF toilets could also be used if they can be desludged easily.

C. Low-density rural areas: Arborloos (‘excreta in, money out’) or ‘fossas alternas’, though long-life single-pit VIPs and pour-flush toilets could also be used.

No EcoSan until it’s a financially viable option! (You can argue that Arborloos and fossas alternas are EcoSan systems, but they’re the only affordable EcoSan options at the moment.)

And don’t even think any more about trying to meet the MDG sanitation target − we haven’t a cat in hell’s chance of meeting it, so it’s better to face facts and forget about it, and have instead the more equitable goal of universal provision of adequate sanitation by − well, who knows when? But if you need a date, then 31 December 2025, as recommended in the Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report.

Key success factors for WatSan

Once more ex Africa aliquid boni − to paraphrase the Latin tag (original here). I say this as I came across for the first time the other day the excellent paper Managing water supply and sanitation services to developing communities: key success factors by Professor C. F. Schutte of the University of Pretoria. His ‘key success factors’ are:

1. Developing credibility of the organisation providing WatSan services with the community it serves:
(a) Creating an organisation-wide culture of service to customers,
(b) Ensuring reliability in the water supply, and
(c) Ensuring community involvement.

2. The creation of a culture focussing on maximising income and minimising losses:
(a) Create a culture and awareness of focussing on generation and collection of income, and
(b) Create a culture of cost consciousness and focus on minimisation of losses.

The paper has several ‘pearls of wisdom’ − for example:

The typical approach of a bureaucratic type of organisation is that it functions as a cost centre. This means expenditure is budgeted for and the approved budget is spent irrespective of what the income is. To be successful a water services organisation must operate as a business centre which means that expenditure must be linked to income. This requires that the financial systems must support such an approach and furthermore that a culture of cost consciousness must be established throughout the organisation – with management leading by example.

This is a really good paper, well worth reading in full.