These 2-page guidelines focus on the operators and users of the different installations, to improve acceptance, maintenance and safety.

Available are:

• Nutshell guideline 1: Small scale composting of human faeces (PDF; 0.5MB)
• Nutshell guideline 2: Fertilization with human urine (PDF; 0.5)
• Nutshell guideline 3: Maintenance of public urine diverting toilets (PDF; 0.5MB)

Further publications from RESPTA are available here.

• School Based Sanitation
• Community Based Sanitation
• Emergency Sanitation
• Sanitation for Hospitals & Hotels
• Sanitation for Agro-Industry
• Sanitation for Prisons
• Real Estate Sanitation
• Sludge Treatment Plant
• Health Impact Assessment & Hygiene Education
• Sanitation Mapping
• Capacity Development

The German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) recently introduced a new newsletter mailing tool which enables the ecosan program within GTZ to refocus on the actual content of each newsletter and at the same time highlight some sustainable sanitation projects that are partly funded by the German government and other donors.

The newsletter is available for download as a PDF file (0,4 MB) and may be subscribed to on this page (which also offers other interesting GTZ newsletters). An archive of previous editions is also available on the (relaunched) website of the GTZ ecosan program.

What’s this?

It’s liquid gold.

A colleague of ours in Burkina Faso just posted this photo with the following explanation on the EcoSanRes Discussion Group online:

Anyway, I was in Fada (eastern Burkina) a couple of days during the end of last week and the 10 urban farmers there who had tried urine as fertilizer were not disappointed. The photo attached provides evidence – it is at one of the farmer’s homes, and the bottles do not contain fanta…

CREPA HQ
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

What started in October 1997 as an international research project on urban and periurban vegetable production, has resulted in eight allotment gardens for almost 100 urban poor families of Cagayan de Oro, a city in the Philippines.”

“So what’s the relation to sanitation?” you may ask…well, they’re using Urine-Diverting Dehydration Toilets on all allotment gardens – which (among the provision of sanitational facilities) allow a reuse of treated faeces and urine as soil conditioners and free fertilizer.

The Philippine Allotment Garden project also provides answers to the question of urban farming – a challenge for the 21st century that may go hand in hand with proper sanitation.

The latest version of the “Philippine Allotment Garden Manual with an Introduction to Ecological Sanitation” of Xavier University’s Periurban Vegetable Project (PUVeP) is now available online as a PDF (0,8 MB).

“The idea for the creation of this Global Atlas of Excreta, Wastewater Sludge, and Biosolids Management originated at the IWA Biosolids Conference, “Moving Forward Wastewater Biosolids Sustainability: Technical, Managerial, and Public Synergy” held in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada in June 2007.”

The 5,4 MB PDF is 632 pages long and can be downloaded here for free.

(ISBN: 978-92-1-132009-1)

The new fact sheet of the SuSanA working group “Sustainable Sanitation for cities and planning” summarizes the 3 most important planning documents: Sanitation 21 (IWA), HCES – Household Centred Environmental Sanitation (WSSCC/Eawag-Sandec) and SSA – Strategic Sanitation Approach (WSP). The fact sheet can be downloaded here: http://www.susana.org/images/documents/05-working-groups/wg06/final-docs/en-susana-factsheet-WG06-planning-version-1.1.pdf.

The Austrian Development Agency (ADA) in cooperation with the EcoSan Club has published a brochure on planning principles “Solutions in Sanitation – Planning Principles”. The publication is available as download: http://www.entwicklung.at/en/service/publikationen/folder-und-broschueren.html. That link offers also the possibility to order hard copies.

Furthermore NETSSAF also published a participatory planning tool which was distributed at the final conference of the network “Pathways towards Sustainable Sanitation in Africa” in September 2008 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. It will be available soon at the webpage of the network.

The new issue of the RUAF Urban Agriculture Magazine “Water in Agriculture” features a special section on reuse-oriented or productive sanitation systems.

Productive sanitation stands for closing the nutrient loop between sanitation and agriculture to achieve higher agricultural production and improved food security.

The RUAF Magazines can be downloaded here: http://www.ruaf.org/node/101

Issue 20 features among other interesting articles:

• Page 38: Productive Sanitation: Increasing food security by reusing treated excreta and greywater in agriculture by Robert Gensch
• Page 41: Ecosan Fertilizers with Potential to Increase Yields in West Africa by Linus Dagerskog, Simeon Kenfack and Hakan Jönsson
• Page 44: Reuse of Ecological Sanitation Products in Urban Agriculture: Experiences from the Philippines by Robert Holmer and Gina Itchon

“The guiding vision of Global Handwashing Day is a local and global culture of handwashing with soap. Although people around the world wash their hands with water, very few wash their hands with soap at the critical occasions.”

There even is a dedicated website for this cause with further information on why we actually need a Global Handwashing Day:

“Handwashing with soap is the most effective and inexpensive way to prevent diarrheal and acute respiratory infections, which take the lives of millions of children in developing countries every year. Together, they are responsible for the majority of all child deaths. Yet, despite its lifesaving potential, handwashing with soap is seldom practiced and difficult to promote. (…) A vast change in handwashing behavior is critical to meeting the Millennium Development Goal of reducing deaths among children under the age of five by two-thirds by 2015.”

Have you already washed your hands with soap today?

The Compendium is a joint production of Eawag/Sandec and the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) and will be available free as downloadable PDF, or be ordered for US$ 30 from Sandec in due time.

“By presenting an extensive array of available options, we hope that this Compendium helps promote people-centred solutions to real sanitation problems by providing information to those who are looking for alternatives to the most common offerings.” (source)

I had a look at a preview edition of this compendium the other day and have to admit it really is a very smart & handy publication for those who would like to get an overview of existing technologies and approaches. It will certainly become very popular as it is devided into two sections:

• Section 1 describes different system configurations at the macro scale.
• Section 2 consists of 52 different Technology Information Sheets, which describe the main advantages, disadvantages, applications and the appropriateness of the technologies required to build a comprehensive
  sanitation system. Each Technology Information Sheet is complemented by a descriptive illustration.

Contrary to many other recent publications in the sanitation sector, it doesn’t focus on the political framework issues, but instead provides an ideal overview on existing technical solutions and those to come.

Compendium of Sanitation Systems and Technologies
158 Pages, 52 Technical Drawings, 29,7 x 21 cm.
Eawag/Sandec and WSSCC, 2008
ISBN: 978-3-906484-44-0