Top three toilets?

From the Gates Foundation website (dated 14 August): ‘Bill Gates Names Winners of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge’:

California Institute of Technology in the United States received the $100,000 first prize for designing a solar-powered toilet that generates hydrogen and electricity. Loughborough University in the United Kingdom won the $60,000 second place prize for a toilet that produces biological charcoal, minerals, and clean water. University of Toronto in Canada won the third place prize of $40,000 for a toilet that sanitizes feces and urine and recovers resources and clean water.

More details were given in the 1 September issue of The Economist in an article entitled ‘Flushed with pride’ – you really must read this! Here’s a couple of quotes to whet your appetite:

“Urine is filtered through sand, and the resulting fluid is sterilised with ultraviolet light”

and

“A tank feeds mixed urine and faeces through a rig that heats it to 200°C under high pressure, killing pathogens”

– and these are meant to be prototypes of new household-level toilets for, I presume, the urban and rural poor!

All a bit too much, wouldn’t you say?

[I should have made this post a good few weeks ago, but ill health delayed me.]

Agroforestry and arborloos

In a letter to The Economist (28 July 2012) Tony Simons, Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, writes that, to reduce hunger and promote food security in the Sahel, agroforestry is the way forward. As he notes, “Trees provide not only ecological resilience but also cash income, energy, environmental services, fodder for animals and nutritious fruits”. Not a mention of arborloos. When will agriculture catch up with sanitation?

Erdos: “World's biggest eco-toilet scheme fails”

“The dry toilets in Inner Mongolia's Daxing eco-community have been quietly replaced after three years of bad smells, health problems and maggots.” Oops! See the full entry in the Guardian Environment Network (30 July 2012).

Fossas alternas

IRC has on its website a good photo-sequence on how to build a fossa alterna: “This photo story shows you how to construct a fossa alterna, how to empty it and how to process the compost. After 12−18 months of composting it is safe to empty a fossa alterna toilet and use the compost as fertilizer for your garden soil”. Fossas alternas? Read Peter Morgan’s Toilets That Make Compost Low-cost, sanitary toilets that produce valuable compost for crops in an African context.

Rural sanitation

What Does It Take to Scale Up Rural Sanitation? by Eduardo Perez and published earlier this month by the Water and Sanitation Program is an important document because, as the report’s webpage says, “Today, 2.5 billion people live without access to improved sanitation. … Of those without access to sanitation, 75 percent live in rural areas [emphasis added].” – so there’s no escaping the importance of rural sanitation. The technologies for rural sanitation are well understood – well, most of them anyway. The report notes that “Scaling Up Rural Sanitation is designed as an evidence-based learning project with an explicit goal to test and document new approaches, reflect on challenges, and develop knowledge products to share lessons learned. Testing innovative approaches implies taking risks and learning from successes and failures.”

Yet, and it’s a big yet, there’s no mention of Arborloos – clearly a major omission!

The 2011 Pumphandle Lecture

Have a look at the John Snow Society’s 2011 Pumphandle Lecture Epidemiology for the Bottom Billion – where there’s not even a pump handle to remove! by Hans Rosling who’s a professor at the Karolinska Institute and also chairman of the Gapminder Foundation. An excellent lecture. Check out the Gapminder videos − you’ll find some pretty stunning ones!

Who’s John Snow? Find out here.

Global WatSan costs

WHO published in May this year Global costs and benefits of drinking-water supply and sanitation interventions to reach the MDG target and universal coverage by Dr Guy Hutton. Here’s the Overview from the WHO webpage for the report:

This report updates previous economic analyses conducted by the World Health Organization, using new WSS coverage rates, costs of services, income levels and health indicators. Benefit-cost ratios (BCR) and costs are estimated to meet the MDG drinking-water and sanitation target and to attain universal access of basic services. Rural and urban areas are analysed as separate targets. The analysis utilises WSS coverage definitions of the JMP (WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation).

The bottom line is: The benefit-cost ratio for the necessary interventions varies from 2.8 in the SSA region to 8.0 in E. Asia. The global economic return on sanitation spending is US$ 5.5 per US dollar invested.

A good, if somewhat exhausting, read! Read the Executive Summary at least.