The “No Frills Human Question”
Water based Sanitation still receives massive funding for infrastructure development, maintenance and energy costs. Why? When Dry Sanitation models linked to Food Security have every advantage!
A crime is conducted when water is mixed with Human Excrement. There is no way sewage plants, even in the Developed World can conduct total nutrient recycling to the land in a safe and healthy manner. What chance for a Developing World to cope! New models for Ecological Sanitation (new name – old practice) must rapidly be adopted if ever the Developing World is to move forward. Food security and soil fertility must be also regarded as aims of equal magnitude. Bringing new concept Dry Sanitation Separator toiletry, linked to “community” agricultural activities is the only solution to a world being stripped of its natural phosphate and potassium resources .
Question: Would you mind to elaborate more
Answer: As a general rule, "plants" provide us with the nutrients we need to function healthily. Plants themselves require 17 or so nutrients for their own health, without they become nutritionally deficient. The modern agricultural model replaces only Nitrogen, Potassium and Phosphate to the root hairs of plants. In an effort to produce large
volumes of food from limited land resources extensive areas of crops are cultivated as mono cultures, naturally prone to disease these mono cultures and must be chemically sprayed. Both chemical spraying and ploughing destroys Nature's nutrient transport mechanisms, the worms and their allies not forgetting those essential soil fungi. Agricultural practice has become become one of the most intensive carbon laden activities on Earth! The end of geological potassium and phosphate reserves is now within sight, and abstraction rates for both are high; prices will become more volatile as food security plays a more dominant role in the Global agenda. Who profits? most certainly not the poor, and malnourished of this world!
Human expulsion contains all the nutrition we have eaten, it has merely been stripped of 50% of its original biochemical energy just to keep us going, and for all humans at the point of expulsion, urine and faeces set out in different directions suggesting methods of collection and aroma treatment. Both uncontaminated solids and urine are easy to re-mediate biologically. The process that may be used is "aerobic composting" in conjunction with agricultural wastes, these are enclosed in a Hot Box.
Within a period of 30 days all human and plant pathogens are eliminated and a green compost, mature at 90 days becomes available for agricultural reuse. In a complex and technical world access to collect excrement in a safe aroma free environment without compromising personal security ranks highly in any design process for Dry Toiletry. Aroma is eliminated by the application of aerobic bacteria and fungi onto expulsion surface. As with all community living systems good planning in dwelling design is important for success. Receptacle collections and transport to composting areas should be planned community agricultural activity, after all Farmers are natural nutrient scavengers wishing the best for their land and crops! New materials for making "Dry Sanitation toiletry plant and systems" will stimulate local regional economies in the developing world.
Human nutrition is a scarce resource and yet the design criteria for water based sanitation is to safely remove the faeces from the immediate environment contain the pathogens and dispose of waste. Most wet systems complete the task of effective removal but fail on the following grounds: Biological pollution of water resources, Total Nutrient Loss, or most complex is Nutrient contamination. Detergents may react with excrement in sunlight forming persistent pollutants such as nonylphenols, a range of heavy metals and chemicals perhaps inadvertently added to the sewage system by the unknowing and uncaring produce endocrine disrupting compounds ---- (Half the male fish in UK rivers exhibit female characteristics.) To make matters worse in areas where Biosolid is returned to the soils regulators must prescribe safe contamination levels when in fact no contamination is the only safe level where food is concerned!
Question I thought that endocrine disrupters originated in urine and not from chemicals added to the sewage system. Does the dry system you describe recover the nutrients only from the faeces, or does it also allow for harvesting the nutrients from urine.
Answer: Regarding Endocrine disrupting compounds may I refer to the UK Parliamentary Post Note 282 (April 2007) on Energy and Sewage and quote directly: "This group of chemicals can disrupt the endocrine system, that is, the system in animals and fish that produces and responds to hormones. Environmental sources include some pesticides, industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals and natural hormones in human and animal waste. EDCs in rivers have been found to have adverse effects on the reproductive organs of some fish species, especially downstream of sewage effluent discharges." Naturally secreted chemicals (hormones ) may be re-mediated in an aerobic composting process.
Regarding nutrient recovery from expulsion 80% becomes available from Urine, and 20% from solids. The compost process produces much heat driving moisture from the mass. For effective compost re-mediation the moisture level in process should be maintained at 55% or thereabouts. (i.e. add urine) Dependant on collection
volumes of urine all should be used in process. The agricultural bonus for the user community is the "plant vitality and disease resistance" given to the compost by the fugal action.
Comment on the dialogue thus far: It is difficult to develop infrastructure which will become part of an individuals private property, it would take more effort to be accepted by the users and in many cases will need to be adapted to each household, making it difficult to control in terms of budgetary regulation. But taking into account the evident advantages and the urge to implement decentralized systems even in peri-urban and urban settings, a big effort of institutional innovation should be done to favour this kind of technologies, including public sector rules and communication issues.
Answer: I sometimes wonder whether the sale of both water and electrical energy for pumping... and the margins yielded from these operations have anything to do with the centralizing and regulating drive.
The sustainable business paradigm demands that nutrients whether they be technical or biological are always recovered, never wasted. Why sell to individuals a toilet and receptacle which is made from complex combined technical components all of which must be recovered at the end of the product's life (eg plastics, metals, ceramics etc) ? These materials are normally required to “make” a really good modern dry toilet and its sanitation system work effectively. The chosen transport method and the re-mediation or composting plant are as important as the toiletry. Could the answer lie in a lease rental programme for the whole system over its entire life where it is maintained new for new?
As regards the acceptability of Dry Sanitation toiletry the perception of a smelly hole in the floor where lose change, mobile hones and children are lost in a dark pit should be as far away as we are from the moon. These challenges can be overcome, though I accept that awareness and good planning in the first instance will eliminate future problems. He who would build first, placing his Food Security / Sanitation System last must surely reap the problematic reward that will come his way!
Comment on the Dialogue so far. Water carriage is in many cases culturally preferred, more economical, and more protective of public health and environmental quality than “dry sanitation” alternatives. Are you familiar with the Ecosan project in Erdos? Erdos is a new water-short town in Inner Mongolia. This 5-year pilot project installed urine diverting, composting toilets, and grey water treatment in a 3,000 person, four story apartment complex. In the words of its designers “Materials input for the Ecological sananitation system is higher than for the water-borne one by about USD 920 for each household.” In other words, it was more expensive to implement than would have been the case for a conventional water-carriage system.
While the Ecosan system results in 30% savings in water use, there were problems in implementation:
1) It was more complex than water carriage
2) It was viewed as backward by residents
3) There were odors in the residences
In the end residents voted to replace the Ecosan toilets with flush toilets.
For an individual community it may well be that an appropriate water carriage system satisfies these criteria better than a dry sanitation system.
Answer: I do not like using metaphors to consider complex problems, please forgive me if I do so this once. Human kind displays qualities similar to yeast or bacteria in a nutrient filled Petri-dish, log phase growth 6 and more billion to how many? The difference is that two thirds of our human population has learned to separate itself from its own expulsion. The residual third suffer the effects of close proximity pollution. The total population use the nutrients in the agar to grow. Realistically the agar has insufficient nutrients to support the population as two thirds of them are busy pitching their nutrition into a nearby pond. The conventional division of labour demands that we become specialists at our own field, ... and I'm sure you know where I'm going with this.
In my opinion recycling nutrition is neither economically nor practically desirable as it's results produce no profit for those industries involved in conventional sanitation, and the output can't be used by the Big Global Food Producers on a cost basis. The market is at work here ensuring Big is Beautiful and cheap! This efficiency driven process means that the average age of farmers in a principally rural economy such as Nigeria, is over 60! There is another problem, produce the best agricultural compost around and there will be few to take it as 'big food' drives prices down. Given this scenario there is no hope for our future as we are all dependant on nutrition to survive.
I believe it is worth sharing with everyone our vision of the model which will drive the closure of the Agricultural / Sanitation link: In simple terms the target community identified by proximity of living, becomes fiscally and administratively responsible for all the sanitation and agricultural actions taken within the community. In other words it becomes the employer of agriculturists, payer of economic wages and purveyor of food. The Community itself becomes an open Partnership with both financial and land owning partners in a shared programme of responsibility, it is after all in every individuals best interests to do so.
In this model the sanitation engineer becomes a system long term provider of plant and service to the economic community so formed. That economic community then pays its “lease rent” over the long term as everyone works towards the same nutrient recycling goals. ( check out Chris Cook who has described the type of organisation necessary to undertake this challenge - Open Capital Cooperative Capitalism ( http://bit.ly/3A7fM ) The sustainable business model only ever requires that it lease rents to its clients the highest quality, best performing plant with the longest life, therefore the best cost is offered to its client, the community partnership. The business never sells, so removing the need to continually innovate novelty into a product, or build in system or item failure as has been corporate strategy for years, its been the conventional economic driver in a throw away economy. One that can not last.
The individual and community contract to buy food from the agriculturists closes the gap. This procedure describes a safe way forward for a complex set of problems.
Comment on the Dialogue so far: By no means all of the 2/3 of the world's population currently connected to water carriage systems pitch their nutrition into the pond! Removal of carbon, solid, nitrogen, and phosphorus is effectively done in Europe, much of North America, South Africa, and the first-world countries of Asia. Energy recovery takes place by direct and indirect use of anaerobic digester gas. We have over a century of experience in such recovery. The Erdos project is an example of a failed system. If this were so easy, we would all be composting our excrement. But it is not so easy for those of us in 20 story apartments in the urban areas of the world where 1/2 of the world's population currently live. You almost describe no hope for our future. We will have a very serious problem to accommodate the 6 billion people that will be living in mega cities by the year 2050. A direct link to agriculture will not be
