Dear all,

now the final report if the SANIRESCH project in Eschborn is available.
All who are interested to learn more about the final project results and details are most welcome to visit the SANIRESCH website: www.saniresch.de (German) and www.saniresch.de/en/publications-a-downloads/publications (English)

Next to the final project report, which is written in German with an English abstract, 8 two-pagers of the different project topics summarizing the most important results are available:

• Sanitary and In-house installations
• Plant technology
• Operation and monitoring
• Quality of the products / Storage of urine
• Acceptance
• Agricultural production / Legal situation
• Economic feasibility
• International adaptability

I am looking forward to your comments.

Yours, Martina.

Dear Martina,

thanks a lot, most interesting! That will give a good read! I'll probably come back with questions later.

However, one thing in advance: What elements of the project (urinals, no-mix toilets, urine tanks, treatment facilities, reuse) will be maintained or continued, now that the research project is completed?

Congratulations for finishing that big piece of work!
Florian

Dear Florian,

thanks and I am looking forward to your questions.

Regarding the question about continuance of the project:
GIZ decided to continue the waterless urinals in combination with urine collection. While the NoMix toielts, the treatment of grey- and brownwater and the MAP precipitation was finalised.
There are a couple of reasons to do so. I am just listing the most important ones (and I promise you all the minor details are in the report. Just read it. ):

• The NoMix toilets are hard to manage and had too many breakdowns. A urine valve lasted on average for about 340 days.
• The MAP repcipitation was still in research scale and required too much manual labour to be continued (4,5 hours to treat 600-1000l of urine).
• As the building is already getting service water from groundwater pumped in another building, there was no need for additional service water provision from brown- and greyweater treatment for the future.

Best regards,
Martina.

Thanks Martina, for the quick answer!

mwink wrote:


So urine will be continued to be collected and used?

In case this questions is answered in the report, just tell me which chapter

Dear Florian,

from my point of knowledge (I am not working for GIZ anymore) yes, urinals and collection remains. Although an application in agriculture is only possible while escorted by research.

If you are interested in the state of the art of German legislation for urine application in agriculture, I recommend chapter 3.5.3.4.
Additionally, Madeleine from SEI posted interesting news in the discussion forum a week ago. See here: forum.susana.org/forum/categories/17-fer...blackwater-and-urine

Yours, Martina.

As far as I know (I also don't work for GIZ anymore), the urine tanks (4 x 2.5 m3) will remain in the cellar and they will be full of urine at all times, but overflow into the sewer (although I had wondered if it wouldn't make more sense in that case to bypass them completely and leave them sit empty - to avoid any potential odour problems). Not sure what the Facility Management decided to do in the end. Perhaps Christian or Rahul or Trevor could clarify.

In any case, should a university in the Frankfurt region develop an interest in doing further research with that urine, it would be available....

It's probably been mentioned before, but here is the link to the final conference on this project with all presentations from the 2 day event in Eschborn (all in German except for one from the Netherlands (Brendo Meulmann) and one from Sweden (Björn Vinneras)):
saniresch.de/de/publikationen-a-downloads/nass-tage

(it was a very successful event, thanks to an amazing project manager called Martina )

Dear Martina and Elisabeth, thanks for these infos!
So time to read that report now ...
best,
Florian

Dear all

There has been a lot of discussion about NoMix toilets recently and I would like to share our experience with the Roediger toilets at Eawag.

Our first Roediger NoMix toilets were installed in the main building of Eawag (Forum Chriesbach, www.forumchriesbach.eawag.ch) in 2006 and have been operational since then. Later Roediger NoMix toilets have also been installed in the second office building in Dubendorf. The main difference between the two sets of installations is the flushing water: in Forum Chriesbach, the toilets are flushed with rain water, while in the other office building, tap water is used.

A first report on our experiences with the NoMix system in Forum Chriesbach has been published in 2009, unfortunately only in German: Goosse, P., Steiner, M., Udert, K.M. and Neuenschwander, W. (2009) NoMix-Toilettensystem: Erste Monitoringergebnisse im Forum Chriesbach. Gas Wasser Abwasser (7), 567-574.

Since then, we have gained more experience, especially with the toilets that are flushed with tap water. Here are some of the challenges we have encountered: The main problem is the flushing: the toilet paper often gets stuck on the dividing wall between urine and feces outlet, so that the toilets have to be flushed more than once. Furthermore, it seems that the toilets get dirtier than conventional toilets due to the insufficient flushing. This causes more work for the cleaning staff. Another minor problem are incrustrations on the valves, which close the pipe leading to the urine tank. This problem mainly occurs with the tap water flushed toilets due to its content of calcium and magnesium. It can be solved by regular soaking and flushing with citric acid (20%). At Eawag this is done once a month. In the toilets flushed with rainwater, this problem is less prominent. Some of the valves broke and had to be replaced, but this did not happen very frequently. One problem, we did NOT encounter was malodor.

To summarize: The Roediger is a good choice, if you have committed caretakers. If not, you might not want to use any of the current NoMix toilets. Furthermore, I strongly recommend (a) to use rainwater for flushing, (b) to inform the customers about the purpose and goals of the system, (c) to do regular cleaning to ensure customer acceptance and (d) to flush the valves regularly with diluted citric acid (10% with rain water, 20% with tap water flushing) in order to prevent the build-up of crusts.


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Note by moderator (EvM): see also related discussion about urine diversion flush toilets at a trial in Sydney, Australia:
forum.susana.org/forum/categories/34-uri...-in-sydney-australia

Hi Kai

Thanks for your email, its great to hear about other's experiences

We had an Australian toilet manufacturer involved in our project and while
they did all the Australian standards testing of the UD toilets. We all came
to the conclusion pretty quickly that UD toilets would be problematic in
public settings and waterless urinals would provided more potential for
collection of urine.

We trialled Dubbletten and Wostman and had similar experiences to you in that there were problems with toilet paper getting stuck on the barrier and the toilets being dirtier than conventional toilets requiring more work for cleaners. But what was fascinating was that within a month of the toilets being installed we actually had significantly less problems (almost non-existent) with cross contamination from faeces and miss-placed toilet paper as people learned how to use the toilets

For further details see: www.isf.uts.edu.au/publications/Mitchell...unny-dunny-pilot.pdf


Kind Regards
Dena