Students test sanitation system in India using breathable fabric technology

Science Daily, January, 2015

Breathable fabric used in field test traps waste and allows only tiny water vapor molecules through.

 Credit: Evan Krape, University of Delaware

A team of researchers led by Steven K. Dentel, professor of civil and environmental engineering (University of Delaware), has been working for several years on a breathable fabric that can be used to line pit toilets and other basic sanitary facilities in developing nations.

Approximately 2.5 billion people around the world are still without adequate sanitation, which leads to water contamination responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. About a billion people still have to defecate in the open, without any privacy or sanitary facilities.

The fabric Dentel and his team are developing is similar to that used in sports jackets and raincoats; it only allows tiny water vapor molecules through.

Dentel realized this could be a valuable way to filter out liquid water from human waste, letting the pure water escape while retaining everything else. Sewage placed in a container of this fabric would become dehydrated and therefore less hospitable to bacteria and other disease-causing organisms.

Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the project has been in the works for some time. The lab results look promising, but must still be tested in the field.

On Dec. 28, a small group led by doctoral student Shray Saxena headed to India to begin the first field test of the new fabric.

"A lot of people in India right now don't have improved toilet systems," says Saxena. "Even in cities like Kanpur, which are really quite developed, people do not have these facilities available to them."

Because sanitation in these cities is often decentralized, an advantage of this disposal system is that it does not require connection to central water or sewage lines.

Families in two cities, Kanpur and Puri, are trying out the new "eco-vapor" toilet system, with sewage collected in 55-gallon drums lined with the breathable fabric, allowing water vapor to evaporate.

The group is observing how the fabric performs under varying conditions of heat and humidity, which affect the rate at which water diffuses through the membrane. If external humidity is high, the lined drums may fill up before enough of the water can evaporate.

The nongovernmental organization WaterAid India is partnering with the research group on site selection and implementation of the pilot project.

In addition to Saxena, the team that went to India included Paul Imhoff, professor of civil and environmental engineering, doctoral student Babak Ebraziakhshayesh and two undergraduate students, Kelsey McWilliams and Dianna Kitt.

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Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by University of Delaware. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Open defecation-free country became national slogan in 2014

Press Trust of India@ibnlive.com Jan 01, 2015

New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government undertook a significant step in 2014 to make the country free from open defecation under an ambitious plan of around Rs 2 lakh crore.

The year also saw the government deciding to implement the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project for Low Income States (RWSSP-LIS) of Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh with World Bank assistance over a period of six years (from 2013-14 to 2019-20).

The project is aimed at providing improved piped water supply covering approximately 17,400 habitations in 2,150 gram panchayats in 33 districts of the four States.
Open defecation-free country became national slogan in 2014

The Swachh Bharat Mission aims at attaining a 100 per cent open defecation free India by 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.

Wielding the broom himself, Mr. Modi launched 'Clean India' campaign on October 2 and was joined by Chief Ministers, lawmakers, prominent personalities from various fields.

The Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) aims at attaining a 100 per cent open defecation free India by 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.

The main objective of the programme is to bring about an improvement in the general quality of life in the rural areas, by promoting cleanliness, hygiene and eliminating open defecation and accelerate sanitation coverage in rural areas.

The main activities under the mission are incentives for individual household latrines, construction of community sanitary complexes, solid and liquid waste management projects, information education and communication, capacity building, monitoring and evaluation.

Mr. Modi, while launching the programme, asserted that Swachh Bharat mission is "beyond politics" and inspired by "patriotism". He invoked Gandhi's vision of a "clean and developed" India as he formally kicked off the five-year-long campaign.

The tech-savvy Prime Minister even launched his own version of ALS ice bucket challenge, nominating nine eminent personalities including Sachin Tendulkar, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, industrialist Anil Ambani along with several actors like Salman Khan, Priyanka Chopra and Kamal Hassan to spread awareness on the issue and asked them to continue the chain.

The ministry also launched a nationwide real-time monitoring of use of toilets on Thursday. The monitoring system was unveiled to give a big push to Swachh Bharat Mission.

People across the country will be mobilised to check and verify the use of toilets in the rural areas through mobile phones, tablets or iPads and upload the same in case of any discrepancy on the ministry's website in tune with online citizen monitoring.

Earlier, the monitoring was done only about the construction of toilets, but now the actual use of toilets will be ascertained on a sustained basis.

According to a parliamentary panel report tabled in the Lok Sabha recently, the practice of open defecation in India is due to combination of factors, the most prominent of them being the traditional behavioural pattern and lack of awareness of people about the associated health hazards.

In its report on Drinking Water and Sanitation, the Standing Committee on Rural Development even noted the fact that sanitation is mainly a mindset issue based on socio-cultural issues and habit.

Norway to take up 'Clean India' campaign in Varanasi

 

ANI News Dec. 16, 2014

Varanasi, Dec. 14 : Norway's Ambassador to India, Eivind S. Homme, met Varanasi Mayor Ram Gopal Mohale here to take forward Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Swacch Bharat Abhiyan' in the city.

Mohale said that Norway-based telecommunications company Uninor and its India's subsidiary will help civic agencies in Varanasi to clean the city as well as the river Ganges.
"Norwegian Ambassador has said that both the countries will cooperate in making Varanasi more beautiful and clean. He said he would take Varanasi's culture to Norway," said Mohale.

Meanwhile, the Norwegian envoy said that it would be a learning experience for him.
"We have companies who very much are in this area how to clean water and even also make energy of it at the same time. So I think I am here in the learning expedition to hear more how we can have contacts and how we can work together. I am also here to learn more about the activities of the company Uninor, which is one of our most reputable companies. It was also very active in India," he said.

The 'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan' was launched nationwide to focus on sanitation, hygiene and waste management. It encourages people to sweep, remove garbage, debris and unauthorized encroachments from roads, markets and residential places. The 'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan' aims at making India a clean country by 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. 

Turning human waste into clean energy

By Frederika Whitehead, www.thehindu.com   October 16th, 2014

They call them “flying toilets” — the bags of human poo that are thrown out of the windows of the thousands of small shacks that make up Nairobi’s slums.

The largest of Nairobi’s informal settlements is Kibera, just three miles from the city centre. An estimated one million people live there, and toilet facilities are scarce. The bare earth streets are carved with gullies: equal parts open sewer and rubbish dump. The nearest toilet for most people is a hole they have dug in a bare patch of ground at the back of their shack.

But Josiah Omotto, a managing trustee of the Umande trust, has high ambitions: he wants Nairobi to become an open defecation-free city. It’s a big challenge to set for yourself. “If open defecation was banned in Nairobi today, every member of the informal settlements would have to queue for two days to use the existing toilet facilities,” he says.

Umande and the British charity Practical Action have devised a solution that turns the mountains of odorous human waste from a problem into an asset. They are building bio-centres — toilet facilities where human slurry is collected and put in a digester which collects the methane emitted from poo as it breaks down. The methane is sold back to the slum dwellers as biogas, used for cooking within the centres or to power hot showers.

“Every individual creates 300g of human waste each day, and 60 per cent of Nairobi’s four million inhabitants live in its informal settlements — that’s 2.4 million people,” says Mr. Omotto.

“What we have in Nairobi is 7,20,000 kg of human waste. We want to turn it into biogas so that we can tackle the energy crisis.” Methane is a greenhouse gas. If released into the atmosphere it is many times worse for the environment than CO. Steps are being taken worldwide to reduce emissions but since we humans are likely to carry on defecating for many years to come, human poo could be considered the ultimate source of renewable energy. It’s much better for the environment to burn the methane from poo than from fossil fuels, after all.

Umande and its partners have built 57 biocentres in Nairobi, which have so far managed to collect at least 60,000 kg of poo, says Mr. Omotto.

Some biocentres also have other facilities incorporated within the same block, including spaces for recreation, social activities and small businesses.

The Stara biocentre in Kibera is run by women who also manage an orphan school. At the bottom of the centre they offer hot showers powered by biogas, and the first floor is let out as a legal advice centre. The orphanage earns 45,000 Kenyan shillings a month from the biocentre, which they use to fund their work with the children.

Aidah Ebrahim, project director for Umande, says that between 350 and 1,000 people visit each of the toilet blocks every day, paying three cents each to use the loo, and a few cents more for a hot shower, if those are available.

But the project was not without its challenges. Transporting heavy building materials across dirt streets riven with gullies and piled high with detritus is not easy, and theft of building materials is commonplace in Kibera. Umande held negotiations and the community helped to transport the building materials, and keep them secure while the facility was being built.

“Most of the projects are funded by grants from donors, but since last year we have partnered with financial institutions who are providing loans to pay for future sanitation projects,” says Ebrahim. “This came after we definitively proved that the projects are bankable, profitable and scalable.” Umande is working with engineers from Denmark and the Netherlands on converting the bioslurry into fertiliser, and to see how we can recycle the water. They are also working with a private company from Thailand to bag large quantities of gas for resale to small businesses in the city. In the future, Umande would like to incorporate solar panels to buildings and biodigesters to existing toilets so that they do not have to build completely new facilities to create energy.

Practical Action is replicating the project in other countries. In Vattavan, Sri Lanka, they power their digester with animal waste, providing cooking gas and lighting in rural areas. One of the project’s fans is Sakunthaladev Kathiravetpillai who lives with her husband and four children. She used to spend each day collecting fire wood for cooking but now she uses biogas and has more time to grow food, or earn money for the family. She uses the dried out manure that is left after the poo has decomposed as fertiliser on her vegetable garden.

This week, Umande broke ground on the first of a series of toilet block biocentres in a slum in Kisumu, near Lake Victoria. City officials reached out to the group after seeing the success they’d had with the biocentres in Kibera. It seems the renewable energy potential of poo is an idea worth spreading. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014)

TIME.com: Is It Time to Kill Off the Flush Toilet?

World Toilet Organization

Indeed, not only is sanitation a good idea, it's a good investment. Biosolids can be composted into fertilizer, sewage can be processed into methane biogas, and even simple latrines in India are producing compost and fertilizer."Globally, if universal sanitation were achieved by 2015, it would cost $95 billion, but it would save $660 billion," writes Rose George in her newly released book "The Big Necessity."

Real-world examples follow: "When Peru had a cholera outbreak in 1991, it cost $1 billion to contain but could have been prevented with $100 million of better sanitation measures." Or even more alarming: "Pakistan, for example, spends 47 times more on its military budget than on water and sanitation, though it loses 120,000 people to diarrhea a year."

So while 2.6 billion people have no toilet, how many millions of us simply "flush and forget"? Eco-sanitation, or the problem of dealing efficiently and ecologically with sewer systems, wastewater, treatment and purification, is no less a serious one. In the UK alone, the sewage system emits some 28.8 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.

As sewers become overloaded with urban development, drought strikes various regions of the earth, and potable water becomes increasingly scarce, even the flush toilet is now put into question.

Today, those who care are looking at innovative toilet and waste-disposal solutions from India, China and other parts of the developing world, where attitudes and habits are still evolving and open to change

Turning human waste into clean energy

By Frederika Whitehead, www.thehindu.com   October 16th, 2014

They call them “flying toilets” — the bags of human poo that are thrown out of the windows of the thousands of small shacks that make up Nairobi’s slums.

The largest of Nairobi’s informal settlements is Kibera, just three miles from the city centre. An estimated one million people live there, and toilet facilities are scarce. The bare earth streets are carved with gullies: equal parts open sewer and rubbish dump. The nearest toilet for most people is a hole they have dug in a bare patch of ground at the back of their shack.

But Josiah Omotto, a managing trustee of the Umande trust, has high ambitions: he wants Nairobi to become an open defecation-free city. It’s a big challenge to set for yourself. “If open defecation was banned in Nairobi today, every member of the informal settlements would have to queue for two days to use the existing toilet facilities,” he says.

Umande and the British charity Practical Action have devised a solution that turns the mountains of odorous human waste from a problem into an asset.

They are building bio-centres — toilet facilities where human slurry is collected and put in a digester which collects the methane emitted from poo as it breaks down. The methane is sold back to the slum dwellers as biogas, used for cooking within the centres or to power hot showers.

“Every individual creates 300g of human waste each day, and 60 per cent of Nairobi’s four million inhabitants live in its informal settlements — that’s 2.4 million people,” says Mr. Omotto. “What we have in Nairobi is 7,20,000 kg of human waste. We want to turn it into biogas so that we can tackle the energy crisis.” Methane is a greenhouse gas. If released into the atmosphere it is many times worse for the environment than CO. Steps are being taken worldwide to reduce emissions but since we humans are likely to carry on defecating for many years to come, human poo could be considered the ultimate source of renewable energy. It’s much better for the environment to burn the methane from poo than from fossil fuels, after all.

Umande and its partners have built 57 biocentres in Nairobi, which have so far managed to collect at least 60,000 kg of poo, says Mr. Omotto. Some biocentres also have other facilities incorporated within the same block, including spaces for recreation, social activities and small businesses.

The Stara biocentre in Kibera is run by women who also manage an orphan school. At the bottom of the centre they offer hot showers powered by biogas, and the first floor is let out as a legal advice centre. The orphanage earns 45,000 Kenyan shillings a month from the biocentre, which they use to fund their work with the children.

Aidah Ebrahim, project director for Umande, says that between 350 and 1,000 people visit each of the toilet blocks every day, paying three cents each to use the loo, and a few cents more for a hot shower, if those are available.

But the project was not without its challenges. Transporting heavy building materials across dirt streets riven with gullies and piled high with detritus is not easy, and theft of building materials is commonplace in Kibera. Umande held negotiations and the community helped to transport the building materials, and keep them secure while the facility was being built.

“Most of the projects are funded by grants from donors, but since last year we have partnered with financial institutions who are providing loans to pay for future sanitation projects,” says Ebrahim. “This came after we definitively proved that the projects are bankable, profitable and scalable.” Umande is working with engineers from Denmark and the Netherlands on converting the bioslurry into fertiliser, and to see how we can recycle the water. They are also working with a private company from Thailand to bag large quantities of gas for resale to small businesses in the city. In the future, Umande would like to incorporate solar panels to buildings and biodigesters to existing toilets so that they do not have to build completely new facilities to create energy.

Practical Action is replicating the project in other countries. In Vattavan, Sri Lanka, they power their digester with animal waste, providing cooking gas and lighting in rural areas. One of the project’s fans is Sakunthaladev Kathiravetpillai who lives with her husband and four children. She used to spend each day collecting fire wood for cooking but now she uses biogas and has more time to grow food, or earn money for the family. She uses the dried out manure that is left after the poo has decomposed as fertiliser on her vegetable garden.

This week, Umande broke ground on the first of a series of toilet block biocentres in a slum in Kisumu, near Lake Victoria. City officials reached out to the group after seeing the success they’d had with the biocentres in Kibera. It seems the renewable energy potential of poo is an idea worth spreading. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014

Bathroom Break: India’s Sanitation Crisis Is Trapping Women In A Cycle Of Violence

 http://anushayspoint.com/2014/09/05/bathroom-break-indias-sanitation-crisis-is-trapping-women-in-a-cycle-of-violence/

Source: Melinda Gates  Nov. 6, 2014.

Women and girls often travel in pairs in the dark to relieve themselves in open fields. Image credit: WaterAid.

Last week, the Thomson Reuters Foundation outlined how Bangladesh, India’s much poorer and flood-prone neighbor, has had more success building bathrooms for its citizens.

In just over a decade, Bangladesh managed to decrease the percentage of people defecating in the open from 19% in 2000 to just 3% in 2012.

However, across the border in India the picture is very different. According to the World Bank, over 600 million people, roughly 53 percent of Indian households, still use public streets and fields as bathrooms.

India’s new prime minister Modi is determined to resolve the sanitation crisis,
but will actions match his words?   Image Credit: The Hindu.

And it’s the women of India who are paying the highest price.

The shortage of basic bathroom facilities in India leaves women and girls with no option but to venture out, usually late at night, to relieve themselves in the open.

It is on their way to and from this journey that they face the risk of horrific, even deadly, attacks of sexual violence.

India’s new prime minister Modi is determined to resolve the sanitation crisis,
but will actions match his words? Image Credit: The Hindu.

The world was exposed to this shocking reality when two teenage cousins in Uttar Pradesh were found raped and hanging from a tree just this past summer.

Even though the issue is especially acute in the rural areas, mothers in the urban slums have horror stories about local men staring at them, threatening them and shouting lewd comments while women venture out to defecate in the open.

“We have had one-on-one fights with thugs in order to save our daughters from getting raped,” one mother described. “It then becomes a fight that either you [the thug] kill me to get to my daughter or you back off.”

India’s much smaller and poorer neighbor, Bangladesh has slashed its public toilet crisis. Image Credit: Flickr.

In addition to the horrifying threat of assault and harassment, not being able to access toilets has a series of health implications for women and girls from urinary tract to kidney infections, not to mention the sheer stress of not being able to access a bathroom during your monthly menstrual cycle. 

Why in 2014 are women and girls in India, the world’s largest democracy, facing so much difficulty getting to a bathroom?  At the core of this issue is the low position of women in Indian society.

Safe toilets for women and girls in India could tackle the
country’s rape crisis. Image Credit: WaterAid.

From religion to caste, Indian culture consistently degrades women to the point that they cannot even access the most basic of human rights: to remove bodily wastes with dignity and privacy.

This lack of value placed on the lives of women and girls begins at birth. Three millions girls are considered to be ‘missing ‘ in India where female infanticide, the killing of baby girls, is so common that the UN has called it the most dangerous place in the world to be born a girl.

To a large extent, India is an unsafe place for women period. Last year, a series of high-profile gang-rape cases were globally publicised, and it is estimated that every 30 minutes a woman in India is raped. Delhi is considered the country’s rape capital. 

Bangladeshi experts state that people must feel invested in the toilets
they build in order to actually use them. Image Credit: WaterAid.

Today in India, it is easier to get a mobile phone than find a toilet. How can a country that has more Internet users than the United States, still not provide its citizens with decent latrines? 

Although social attitudes towards women and girls in India will take time to evolve, the issue of building accessible bathrooms is something we can resolve right now and right away, and it appears as though progress is on the horizon.

The country’s new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi addressed the issue in a landmark Independence Day speech, vowing that his government would put “toilets before temples,” and eliminate open defecation. And last week, the organization Sulabh International unveiled 108 cheap new toilets in the same village where the two girls were raped and hung.

“I believe no woman must lose her life just because she has to go out to defecate,” the founder of the charity, Bindeshwar Pathak said.

Building safe toilets for women and girls across India may be the most fitting tribute to those two girls who were denied dignity in life and death. But how India tackles this public health crisis will determine the direction of the women’s rights movement in the country for years to come.

Meet an amazing group of women in Delhi who banded together to convince the local government to build a toilet facility in their community. Not only did they get the project approved, but they made sure the design of the facility met the needs of women and girls, and they’re checking in every day to make sure the construction is on schedule.

These empowered, strong women – and the millions of women around the world like them – are the reason we are so optimistic about the future.