Hi Madeleine

Really enjoyed the blog entries. David writes well.
Just a comment in relation to your last post,

The entreprenuer is an extremely important group yet not receiving enough support they deserve , nor given the rightful respect for their work, on the contrary , as matter of fact we hardly make enough effort to link these entrepreneur even though we speak warmly about sanitation as a buisness. It is high time to improve our interaction with the entrepreneurs that make a tremendous effort to keep the dense settlement clean and we need to find out how to best support them so that they can expand their services join us in the discussion and share your ideas etc

I think you "hit the nail on the head" here.
IMO what everyone needs to do is to simply help connect Entrepreneurs to useful people and contacts within your own network that may be able to help the respective Entrepreneur further. As a simple introduction to get a conversation going between two parties (one the entrepreneur and the other someone in your network) is often really easy to do, a quick email or telephone call to make the introduction. These kinds of gestures can make a difference.

I can write much more on this particular point, but think my message is clear.
Let me know your thoughts on this point / idea!

Kind regards
Trevor

Dear Madeleine,

I am manufacturing dry toilets in France for the european market and I try to developp attractive products. I am testing a new system with design seats (see pictures attach). My developpment is focus on design and easy maintenance, one or twice a year. I just want to do business manufacturing and selling dry toilet.
But how we can do to developp the concept in occidental countries ? How can we developp it in the world ?
What are the arguments we can use to make dry toilets atractive by people ?
How can we work together in SuSanA to developp the business of dry toilets ?
So Madeleine, what do you propose ? You says that professionals are very important but how to involve and developp them ?
You see that there is so many difficultes;
in Africa the projects try to developp systems for less than 10 $ and in Europe, we sell toilets for more than 2000 €.
There were dry urinals in a international organisation bulding (I do not remember where and what structure) that have been removed.
Dry toilets are not link in the mind of people with technology, innovation, future, modernity, beauty,...
In the group "sanitation as a buisness", there is no subject on occidental dry toilets.

I want to work on occidental business for sanitation with actions on "attraction", "design", "technology"...
I would be very happy to find people in the same spirit, but I fill a little bit alone.
If european people can by japaneese toilets with a price of 10 000€, I am sure that there is a market for upper class dry toilets.
I can just propose to create such group but I can not do better.

Regards
Emmanuel Morin
Ecodomeo

Dear all
Not very long ago BPD and SEI started to post some blogs on sanitation as buisness and the entreprenuers in the sector .
Entreprenuership in sanitation is truly an important component for how we will manage to solve the sanitation crises. We need entrepreneurs for service delivery and we need reliant and safe handling of our waste. If this could be a profitable buisness it would definately contribute to a safe and healthy environment.
The entreprenuer is an extremely important group yet not receiving enough support they deserve , nor given the rightful respect for their work, on the contrary , as matter of fact we hardly make enough effort to link these entrepreneur even though we speak warmly about sanitation as a buisness. It is high time to improve our interaction with the entrepreneurs that make a tremendous effort to keep the dense settlement clean and we need to find out how to best support them so that they can expand their services join us in the discussion and share your ideas etc

If you want to read early blogspots they have been posted on the working group Sanitation as a buisness
This is the third blogspot of three


Is the pendulum swinging back? Will centralised sewerage systems soon be eclipsed by decentralised waste treatment?



In November 2011, Jefferson County, Alabama made world news by filing for the largest ever American municipal bankruptcy. Bad housing loans? Pension liabilities too great? No, it was the huge cost of investing in new sewers that tipped them over the edge.


Around the same time, a thousand miles to the North, the municipalities on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, were holding public meetings to discuss options for dealing with their own waste burden. Nitrates from the tens of thousands of on-site facilities are leaking into the groundwater, posing pollution concerns - decentralised treatment seems to them to offer a robust and perhaps cheaper alternative to investing in a centralised system.


In a hundred years time, American historians looking back may see these two events as signalling the moment the pendulum started to swing back – i.e. the point at which the dominance of sewage systems (that rely on treated water to flush waste into our rivers, streams and oceans) started to erode.


History has certainly had its impact on sanitation. A hundred and fifty years ago those living in Minneapolis, USA, hired ‘scavengers’ to periodically clean out and remove the contents of their privy vaults. Night soil got its name as it was removed at night; indeed city ordinances across the USA required latrines to be emptied solely at night. Minneapolis’ first sanitation ordinances sought to control the process of night soil removal and disposal, and the means and hours of transportation, by requiring all the scavengers to be licensed. Amendments to this licensing process continued up until the mid-1930s.


By then however, massive investment had been made into centralised treatment works to channel and treat sewage. Public sanitary reforms in the United States took their lead from the sanitation revolution that had spread from Britain – from where a drive for urban drainage and centralised sewerage had spread to most of the developed world. Huge public investment was poured into centralised sewerage and the business of emptying latrines and transporting the waste to the fields was relegated to a backseat (except in China where waste was valued as manure).


The new sewage networks not only required public investment to build, but required significant technical skills and finance to operate – the diverse pattern of ‘small business’ that had previously dominated sanitation was swept aside, replaced by public ownership of a public service, paid for by municipal taxation.


In developing countries, where still now only 2 in 5 people have access to sewers, ‘on-site sanitation’ as it is known, remained a common practise. Whilst towns remained small and urban agriculture commonplace, the reuse of the waste as fertiliser was widespread. Over time though, towns grew into cities and fields separated from housing. Industrially produced fertiliser became cheaper and more available. As a consequence, the practicality and attractiveness of using latrine waste on fields correspondingly reduced. But as recent events on the East coast of the United States show, perhaps the pendulum is shifting back.


‘On-site sanitation’ and other alternatives to large centralised sewage networks are starting to be taken more seriously. The existence and potential of small, medium and large businesses working in sanitation are also increasingly recognised. It is true that an increasingly urbanised world faces a growing sanitation challenge. But taken together, these two trends are helping shed more light on what options there are to dealing with this challenge – not just in developing countries but also in the developed ones.


There are several contributing factors to this shift, including:


Water scarcity. As economic growth continues and human population, industry and agriculture all grow, water availability decreases. In arid countries such as South Africa this is reaching crisis point – in South Africa fully 98% of available water has already being allocated to different users. In such contexts the wisdom of using water (and not only that, but treated water piped to the home) to flush toilets is starting to be questioned.
The large costs of sewerage. Sewage networks are not cheap. Nor are waste water treatment plants. These costs have succeeded in tipping more than one developed country municipality into bankruptcy. In 1850’s Britain, the cost of providing sewerage was thought to be a necessary investment in the face of worsening epidemics in its rapidly urbanising cities. We know more now about the spread and control of disease and we’ve also explored other ways of treating and re-using waste (as anyone who has ever seen the Space Shuttle will tell you).
Climate events and resilience. As climate change becomes a reality we are becoming more aware of the need for our urban systems to be resilient in the face of stronger and more frequent climate ‘events’. As the flooding of New Orleans made us painfully aware. Sewerage networks are complex systems, with pipes and other infrastructure buried underground. They are thus especially vulnerable in the face of such events. Growing calls for resilience are pushing urban researchers in the North to rethink how they handle municipal services. As a consequence, interest in decentralised waste treatment and ‘resilient systems’ is growing.
Environmental impacts. The flushing of household waste into our river systems and into the sea is being increasingly questioned. With less water in the rivers and more waste being generated, the carrying capacity of the environment to deal with and process our waste is being further strained. Greater environmental awareness is bringing with it wider appreciation of issues such as ‘dead zones’ in coastal areas (particularly where untreated waste is discharged through sea outfalls).
Rising fertiliser prices. Phosphorus is a finite resource and the concept of ‘peak phosphorus’ - akin to that of peak oil - is gaining adherents. A lot of phosphorus is carried in human waste; environmentalists and others would rather this was viewed as a valuable resource than as a noxious waste. For African farmers in particular there should be a solid business case – rather than transporting in expensive chemical fertiliser from afar they can turn to local sources of fertiliser ‘production’.
The green economy. The notion of a green economy – where businesses and others contribute to growth and service delivery in an environmentally friendly way – is gaining ground. The idea is that businesses can “do well by doing good” and thus help to safeguard the planet for future generations.

How a pendulum swing could benefit slum sanitation



Are we really starting to see a significant move away from centralised sewerage systems that rely on water to carry our waste away? Is the pendulum really swinging back?


Perhaps yes, perhaps no - no doubt any shift will take a long time. But the ramifications for developing countries could be huge. In Africa at least, very few countries have succeeded in putting in place sewerage networks of any great scale. Many inherited their networks at independence and these have not always been well maintained (never mind kept pace with rapid urbanisation). Yet attention to other forms of waste management has been minimal; mostly those ‘without’ have been left to fend for themselves. Research and development into alternatives has been minimal and when it comes to technical choices, engineering approaches and norms and standards, professionals in the sector have generally taken their lead from developed countries.


If developed countries, for a range of reasons, start to take decentralised waste management more seriously, then we could see an important paradigm shift. Suddenly decentralised sanitation could be an issue for new towns in the developed world and not just the preserve of slums in the South. This would attract not only money and capacity into innovation and design, but would also alter the status of on-site sanitation more broadly. The water and sanitation sector itself could start to take on-site sanitation more seriously and local governments become more likely to invest and support it. Standardisation should see costs come down and processes become more sophisticated and robust. Financing should become more commonplace and easier to secure, and business models more apparent.


A vision of the future? Maybe. But one thing is for sure - Jefferson County - and the investors underwriting its $4.2 USD billion debt - surely wish there had been alternatives to the sewerage investment that drove it bankrupt!

Monday, 19 March 2012BPD & SEI Sanitation Entrepreneurs Series: Part 1


The weakest link – thinking about urban sanitation chains
By David Schaub-Jones
The thing about chains is that when one link breaks, the whole chain falls apart. So when we talk about urban sanitation as a ‘chain’, it is worth bearing this in mind.
The typical chain as sanitation folk lay it out comprises ‘collection, removal, transport, treatment and re-use’. To lay people this means building a toilet and using it, getting the waste out when it is full, taking that waste somewhere else, treating it to remove the pathogens and – maybe - reusing it as some form of compost so that the nutrients don’t go to waste.
When I set out to write this blog I thought it would be obvious which link was the weakest ...
It had to be the pit emptying and transport. For when that does not happen well the waste from a full toilet usually is emptied close to the house (and while the smell is bad the health impact is longer lasting and more devastating). And there are certainly many times and places that pit emptying and transport does not ‘happen well’. In which case the chain breaks high up and the rest of it lies unused and rusting.

... but on reflection maybe emptying and transport are not the weakest links at all; maybe the treatment and re-use links are weaker still?
For while many people are willing to pay to have their full toilet emptied (and some are even willing to pay the extra that usually takes to get this done hygienically), few are willing to pay the costs of treating this waste and preparing it for any re-use. Thus the cost of treatment falls to the public sector. Too often, in too many places, this cost is not being met. So even where waste does get removed from full toilets or septic tanks and is transported – it gets transported to a treatment facility that does not work as it should. In which case what has been achieved is to transform a lot of diverse ‘point sources’ of pollution into one or two large ones (downstream of malfunctioning or defunct treatment plants).

Figure 3: Yes they are dumping into the sewer, but does the treatment plant work?! © L. Tyers

Because the other thing about chains is that if you pull one end the other usually follows…
It is not a new idea, but what if we could pay for waste to be collected and delivered to one particular point?
The money from this would have to either come from the value of the waste itself (as a resource and source of nutrients or calories for burning) – or from the public sector (as a recognition of the health and environmental impacts of not collecting and treating it).
By setting some transparent rules and regulations about what gets paid for where, we could then leave it to others (the private sector, sure, but also NGOs, CBOs and others) to decide how best to get that waste from where it is created (household, public and institutional toilets) to where it is treated (one or many treatment stations). Perhaps collection, emptying and transport is the way to do this – perhaps a network of underground pipes is – it probably depends much on local context. Maybe we’d be better off with lots of small decentralised treatment stations and not a few large ones?

Figure 4: Turning waste into a resource in Durban © EMWS

The sector may or may not be moving in this direction – but thinking about things in this way does help us understand where the chain is currently working well and where it is not. What aspects of it can truly be considered a market and which are far from it.
In other words, if we were to strengthen the final two links in the chain, would the rest of the chain follow suit

Dear Philipp
The idea is to get the discussion out so we are posting the blog at various blogs.
It is already posted at the BPD blog
bpdwash.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/bpd-sei-s...preneurs-series.html
This was the introduction and teaser .
More blogs to come
Cheers
Madeleine

Dear Madeleine,

thanks for your posting. It sounds really interesting to me! Is this blog already online? Could you please post the link?

Where does the discussion take place - here or on the blog?

Cheers,
Philipp

BPD & SEI Sanitation Entrepreneurs Series: Introduction
Interest in market-based approaches to solving development challenges continues to grow. Yet while smaller, local entrepreneurs are fairly commonplace, workable modus operandi for engaging them in sanitation up-scaling and service improvement are still being sought. Recent work by BPD, SEI, WASTE and others has shown that numerous diverse entrepreneurs offer a range of sanitation services to communities, often with only limited oversight or support from public bodies, NGOs and others.

Can efforts to spread market-based approaches to sustainable, socially acceptable and economically viable sanitation services in developing countries be scaled-up?
What can be learned about the important brokering role that must take place if sanitation entrepreneurship is to ever really take off?
Can the sanitation ‘business’ model develop more predictability, simplicity and rigour (especially in the eyes of bankers and small business consultants)?
This series of BPD and SEI blog posts, prepared by David Schaub-Jones, reflects on these questions currently facing the sector. Over the coming month, a thought-provoking blog will be published weekly culminating in an overview paper on where we are now and where the sector is going in relation to this important topic.
Join us in this conversation; we welcome your comments and feedback