TEDxUniversityofGothenburg – Jan Eliasson – The Global Water and Sanitation Crisis

from site: Access to clean water is a human right and is closely incorporated in the Millennium Development Goal number 7 with the aim to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

Jan Eliasson is chairman of the Swedish WaterAid, former Minister of Foreign Affairs in Sweden and currently represented in the UN group of Ambassadors for promoting the Millennium Goals, offered the opening speech at TEDxUniversityofGothenburg.”

TEDxSingapore – NIkki Shaw – How building toilets is key to better lives

 

from site:”Nikki Shaw is a water and sanitation (watsan) engineer with a passion for toilets. With a career spanning two decades and five continents, Nikki has extensive watsan expertise in both industrial and developing countries: Rural water supply systems in Botswana, grassroots sanitation provision projects in Cambodia, to designing sewerage for Hong Kong tower blocks and Singapore MRT train systems. She has learned many valuable lessons and shares a surprising revelation: Safe toilets are the key to everything good.”

“TEDxSingaporeWomen 2011 was TEDxSingapore’s 13th event since 2009 and was a collaborative event with TEDxWomen in New York and Los Angeles and over 80 TEDx events across the globe.”

Ted talk: Sonaar Luthra: Meet the Water Canary

From site: “After a crisis, how can we tell if water is safe to drink? Current tests are slow and complex, and the delay can be deadly, as in the cholera outbreak after Haiti’s earthquake in 2010. TED Fellow Sonaar Luthra previews his design for a simple tool that quickly tests water for safety — the Water Canary. “

http://www.watercanary.com/Water_Canary.html

Call for papers: World Water Week in Stockholm 2012

press release:

World Water Week in Stockholm 2012

Submit your event proposal or abstract before 15 February

Organisations and individuals are invited to submit proposals for organising a seminar or side event at the 2012 World Water Week, or to send in abstracts for oral or poster presentations for the scientific workshops.

Submitting proposals for seminars or side events

Submitting abstracts for the scientific workshops

The deadline for proposal and abstract submission is 15 February.

This year, the World Water Week in Stockholm will take a closer look at global “Water and Food Security”. Increasing imbalances in the world’s water and food security situation are unfolding. Economies of countries as well as businesses are becoming restrained by the availability of water, leading to a rush for resources beyond national territories. Increasing floods and droughts together with volatile food prices are having direct effects on political stability and national security. At the same time there are great untapped synergies in the management of food and water. The management of these basic resources will have enormous effects on our future.

About the World Water Week
The World Water Week in Stockholm, organised by the Stockholm International Water Institute with FAO and the CGIAR as Key Collaborating Partners for 2012, provides a unique forum for the exchange of views, experiences and practices between the scientific, business, policy and civic communities. The Week focuses on new thinking and positive action toward water-related challenges and their impact on the world’s environment, health, climate, economic and poverty reduction agendas. In 2011, more than 2600 participants from nearly 130 countries attended the World Water Week and some 180 leading international organisations collaborated with SIWI in arranging the event.

The 2012 World Water Week will take place August 26-31.

For more information on the World Water Week in Stockholm visit www.worldwaterweek.org  or download the first announcement.

Stone Prize of £100,000 for innovation and entrepreneurship in water annouced by Stone Foundation

Press from the Stone Foundation:
We are very excited to be launching a new £100,000 prize: The Stone Prize for innovation and entrepreneurship in water.

At the Stone Family Foundation, we want to find, reward and support new initiatives in the water sector that are innovative, entrepreneurial and potentially scalable. We hope the Stone Prize will help take promising approaches to the next level of their development.

We are looking for initiatives based in sub-Saharan Africa and South and South-East Asia that are developing sustainable and effective services to get clean drinking water to people who need it. This could be: marketing and selling low-cost household water purification technology, or using mobile phone technology to process water kiosk payments cheaply.

Our prize winners will be able to demonstrate their potential to have an impact—we’re not looking for ideas that exist only on paper or in someone’s head, but ones which have been tested on the ground in some way. The key for us is that winning applications can show that their idea works, and that applicants have the ambition and energy to take the initiative to the next stage.

Some examples of what we are looking for include:

• Taking a successful idea out of the laboratory and testing ways to market and deliver it in the field;
• Developing ways to successfully market and promote a new technology;
• Adapting an existing service to reach the poorest households; or
• Transferring a promising model into a different context or country.

The Stone Prize is open to all organisations and individuals that meet our criteria. There may be up to five prizes, and the winner(s) will receive £100,000 each.

We hope that this prize will do more than simply finding and supporting initiatives with a potentially significant impact on people’s lives.

We want it to encourage people to talk about what innovation and entrepreneurship means in the water sector, and think about pioneering new ways to ensure everyone has access to safe, clean drinking water.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Addresses Africa’s WatSan Crisis – WaterWired – Mozilla Firefox http://ow.ly/7QwIU

“mini-me” Water and Sanitation Newspapers

Thanks to paper.li out of Switzerland “…based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technoloseegy (EPFL) – Innovation Center (Lausanne, Switzerland)” there is an abundance of “mini-me” newspapers based on tweets Facebook postings etc….  More details are below.  Here is a list of some of  the Water / Sanitation papers that use paper.li   Some are better than others.

web-papers

• E-Source Sanitation News  by Cor Dietvorst
• The Daily WASH  by World Hygiene Programme
• The WaterAid Weekly by WaterAid
• Water, Sanitation and Hygiene by WaSH-Net
• toilet.and.tap  by toilet.and.tap
• The WaSH-Net Sierra Leone Daily by WaSH-Net
• Clean Water Solar SVDs Daily  by Clean Water U-Can SVDs
• WASHgap Uganda WeKli by Peter J. Bury (w)
• The Water Footprints Daily  by Water Footprints
• The Water Street Journal Daily   by Water Street Journal
• Simavi – Wereldtoiletdag by Simavi
• #IFWF3 by Elmi Bester
• The *Água & Water * Daily by Elton Mello
• Humanitarian Aid, Sustainable Dev   by Elton Mello
• Paul de Digitect’s Water paper byPaul de Frankrijker
• The Mighty Bubble Daily Published by Mighty Bubble

how it works (source http://support.paper.li/entries/20023257-what-is-paper-li )

How does Paper.li work? 

Anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account can log-in and create a paper. We provide you with easy to use tools to select your content. You choose your content streams and can create queries and searches based on Twitter users, #tags, keywords, Facebook, your own Twitter timeline, Google+ users, RSS feeds and more.

After you have chosen your sources, we go to work. Behind the scenes, it goes something like this:

• we extract all tweets that include URLs based on your content selection
• we extract the content found on these URLs:
  • text, e.g. blog post, newspaper article
  • photo, e.g. Flickr, yfrog, Twitpic, …
  • video, e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, …
• analyze the extracted text for language ( EN, ES…) and for topic, e.g. Politics, Technology, …
• surface the day’s most relevant articles (using paper.li magic)
• construct a newspaper frontpage using the filtered articles, photos and videos

the links can also be found on WASHLink’s media tab

Dry Toilet 2012 Conference: Call for Papers

Dry Toilet 2012 Conference: Call for Papers

Dear all,

The preparations for the 4th International Dry Toilet Conference are well
under way. We have now finished the Second Announcement and Call for Papers.
Please, see the attachment (2.9 MB). The Brochure in pdf-format can also be
found on our website at drytoilet.org/dt2012.
http://www.drytoilet.org/dt2012/Pdf/Second_Announcement_and_Call_for_papers.pdf

You may submit an abstract *by January 15, 2012*. Conference registration
will be opened in November.

Best wishes,
Erja Takala

–

*Erja Takala (Mrs)*
*Conference Secretary*
*Global Dry Toilet Association of Finland*
*secretary2012 @ drytoilet.org*

Announcing two workshop/training sessions in DRINKING WATER TESTING for fecal contamination

in Mexico City, Mexico
on September 23 and 24,
and in Palenque, Mexico
on September 29 and 30, 2011.

These two day training sessions in Spanish are designed for community health workers and others who wish to be able to accurately and inexpensively test community drinking water for safety.
The workshops will be conducted by Agua Pura Para El Pueblo, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting safe drinking water, and hosted by AMEXTRA, the Mexican Association for Rural and Urban Transformation. The World Health Organization and other organizations recommend testing water samples for the presence of E. Coli bacteria as an indicator of fecal contamination. The workshops will feature the use of the Petrifilm plate from 3M and the Colilert fluorescent assay by IDEXX. These two methods are much simpler to use and more accurate than most other testing methods for coliform bacteria, especially E. Coli. By the end of the workshop participants will have been trained in the use of these methods and will have the testing materials to use in their own programs. The focus will be on modern methods of water testing, but will also include demonstrations of simple methods of water purification.

For more information including costs and registration contact: tom@paraelpueblo.org

Urine Diverting Toilets in Climates with Cold Winters

There was post on the yahoo group ECOSANRES asking about Cold Climate toilets -Cold weather toilets.

A reply mentioned this PDF:

Urine Diverting Toilets in Climates with Cold Winters Technical considerations and the reuse of nutrients with a focus on legal and hygienic aspects.

While  the report is several year old,  the $h1t is still good and worthy of summarizing

basic facts:

Authors and Editors:

• Anna Richert Stintzing
• VERNA, Ecological Inc., Sweden
• Dr. Håkan Jönsson
• Dr. Caroline Schönning
• Kati Hinkkanen
• Dr. Elisabeth Kvarnström
• Dr. Zsofia Ganrot
• Margriet Samwel
• Sascha Gabizon
• Annemarie Mohr
• Publisher: WECF – Women in Europe for a Common Future
• Year:2007
• Pages:42   1.35 mb
• It is formatted 3 columns / page which doe not lend itself  well to computer screens and pdf readers
• It is a fast read to those in this field
• It is a good  read for someone who knows little about this field

Chapters/ sections

1 – Summary
2 – Dry Urine Diversion
3 – EU directives relating to dry urine diversion where urine and faeces
4 – Legal aspects
5 – Cold temperature aspects
-   Freezing of urine
-   Hygiene and treatment of urine
-   Pharmaceuticals and hormones
-   Hygiene and treatment of faeces
-   Technical aspects: construction and maintenance of
-    urine diverting toilets in climates with cold winters
-   Pipes for urine
-   Storage
-   Odour control with ventilation
-   System for reuse of urine and faeces in crop production
-   Home gardens
-   Large Scale Agricultural Production
6 – Examples from pilot projects and research from the northern hemisphere
7 – Knowledge gaps and identified research needs
8 – Annex

Three key points  from the Reportssummary are:

“There are functioning examples of dry urine diversion in regions in the world with cold winter climates. The examples presented in the report show that it is possible to arrange agricultural reuse of urine and faeces in large or small scale crop production.”

“The fact that there are only short periods during the year when urine can be used as a fertiliser place demands on a storage system for the urine. There are a few alternatives; one of the most economic may be to arrange storage on a farm, in covered storage containers previously used for animal urine.”

“There are still development needs and knowledge gaps. Some of these are related to temperate and cold climates, such as the fate of microorganisms in urine at temperatures below freezing. However, this should not be considered a major constraint to the development of dry urine diversion, since the risk is relatively low, and can be handled through combination with other hygienic activities.”

The report reprints 3  basic but useful  tables from other organizations:

1: Recommended guideline storage times for urinea based on estimated pathogen contentb and recommended crop for larger systemsc (WHO, 2006).

2: Requirements on storage and allowed crops for diverted human urine that is collected from larger systems. (Swedish EPA, 2002).

3: Recommendations for storage treatment of dry excreta and faecal sludge before use at household and large-scale (municipal) levels. The treatments assume no
addition of non-sanitised material (WHO, 2006).

Again the report is a quick and easy read, providing a good  preface to a much larger  document that needs to be written on the subject.    The report  ends  nicely,  saying  we need more  research :

“There are some definite areas where there is a need of systematic research and development (R&D). Some of these, especially related to winter climate aspects, are specified in the following text.

Research needs

One of the most discussed questions regarding urine diversion is the fate of pharmaceutical residues after excretion, and how this affects choice of collection and treatment of human excreta. Research on fate of pharmaceuticals in waste water treatment plants is being undertaken in Germany and Sweden. No known field studies are taking place on fate of pharmaceutical residues when urine or sewage sludge is applied to the soil. The current recommendation to use urine as a fertiliser in agriculture rests on the analysis that the soil system is well suited to digest harmful organic substances due to microbial life in the surface layers of soil. This would be an interesting field of study that can give valuable information on design of reuse systems.

Sanitisation of faeces is another aspect that needs attention. The WHO guidelines on the reuse of human excreta in agriculture mention the alkaline treatment by adding ashes or alkaline substances with a storage time of 6 month ( > 35 °C ) as a possible way to sanitise faeces, or 1,5 – 2 years storage time. The temperature intervals given do not cater for needs in temperate or cold climates, which means that knowledge on treatment of faeces in this region should be developed. Research on more simple and robust treatment methods is needed.

Suggested applied R&D projects

-   Establishment of new pilot projects and evaluation of existing projects. Monitoring and evaluation of existing dry urine diversion projects is a costefficient way of generating knowledge. Dissemination of results, regardless of if they are positive or negative, from existing pilots is vital. The establishment of new pilot projects will also contribute to the bank of knowledge.

-   Sanitisation of faecal fraction: research on requested storage in ambient or alkaline environment in temperate and cold climates (winters with temperatures far below zero).

-   Sanitisation of faecal fraction: research on the implementation of chemical sanitisation of faeces with urea. This is an interesting method, but the practical implications need to be studied and developed.

-   Sanitisation of urine: what happens in the urine when it is frozen and what are the implications for storage intervals?

-   Pharmaceutical residues: studies of soil system when urine is used as a fertiliser. Effect on microbial community, speed of decomposition. Comparisons with sewage sludge, farmyard manure.

-   Toilet design: development of risers and squat-plates for local production. Care given to needs of different users: children, disabled, elderly, men, women. Toilets of today need development since many do not divert as much urine as possible, and are unnecessarily difficult to clean.

-   Systems analysis from an economic point of view. Comparison of investment and maintenance costs of urine diversion systems and conventional sanitation.

-   Systems analysis from an environmental point of view. How do different activities affect the sustainability of the system, for example fertilisation strategies, choice of tank, joint measures or single toilets?

-   What are the economical incentives for implementation of urine diversion? How to design the economical system with the regard to municipal responsibility and financial support/ interactions. How should the systems be organized and which are the most important drivers for the different stake holders.”

other  related links

• Inactivation of bacteria and viruses in human urine depending on temperature and dilution rate.
• The Swedish Eco-Sanitation Experience pdf
• Ecosan Sanitation Facilities resources
• Ecosan_Toilets_in_Mongolia.
• Reuse of faeces and urine – Appropedia: The sustainability wiki

• Guidelines for the safe use of wastewater, excreta and greywater. Volume 1: Policy and regulatory aspects
• Guidelines for the safe use of wastewater, excreta and greywater. Volume 2: Wastewater use in agriculture
• Guidelines for the safe use of wastwater, excreta and greywater. Volume 3: Wastewater and excreta use in aquaculture
• Guidelines for the safe use of wastwater, excreta and greywater. Volume 4: Excreta and greywater use in agriculture
• Human urine – Chemical composition and fertilizer use efficiency

• Human Urine – Decomposition Processes and Nutrient Recovery