Providing Sustainable Sanitation

Providing sanitation to everyone on the planet is one of the most pressing challenges of the twenty-first century. The UN Millennium Development Goals specify a target of reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2015. To meet these goals, alternative approaches to conventional sanitation need to be developed and evaluated. These should have the following sustainable features: encourage decentralized systems, allow waste flow stream separation, emphasize water conservation, provide nutrient, organic and energy recovery and allow for water reuse, as well as minimizing waste by-products such as sludge. This chapter classifies a range of alternative systems according to their function (collection, treatment and utilization) and form of wastewater (e.g. faeces, urine, greywater 1) and analyses their potential operational sustainability features. A range of tools are described which have been used by others to evaluate sanitation systems, with most focusing solely on the environmental dimension of sustainability. A case study based on a rural/peri-urban municipality in South Africa is described and used to demonstrate how a set of socio-cultural/institutional, economic and environmental indicators can be used to make a comparison of alternative types of sanitation solutions and so provide a better evaluation of the options available. ©2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd