Ecological sanitation
The negative environmental impacts of the flush toilet has led to the development of ecological Sanitation, or ecosan.
Ecosan is a new paradigm in sanitation that recognises human excreta and household wastewater as resources that can be recovered, treated where necessary, and safely reused.
Ecosan systems enable the recovery of nutrients from human faeces and urine for the benefit of agriculture, thus helping to preserve soil fertility, assure food security for future generations, minimize water pollution and recover bioenergy.
Why ecosan?
Ecosan is a new paradigm in sanitation that recognises human excreta and household wastewater as resources that can be recovered, treated where necessary, and safely reused.
Ecosan systems enable the recovery of nutrients from human faeces and urine for the benefit of agriculture, thus helping to preserve soil fertility, assure food security for future generations, minimize water pollution and recover bioenergy.
Why ecosan?
- Water used in flush toilets is often of drinking quality
- Mixing feces and urine makes treatment difficult and expensive
- A mix of domestic and industrial effluent in water cannot be treated properly, for heavy metals and other pollutants make this water unsuitable for reuse. This is normally discharged into the ground or water bodies
- It has been said that "each person's urine and manure contain approximately enough nutrients to produce enough food to feed that person." Urea is the major component of urine, yet we produce vast quantities of urea by using fossil fuels. By properly managing urine, treatment costs as well as fertilizer costs can be reduced. Feces also contains nutrients that could be used for modern agriculture, as micronutrient deficiency is a significant problem.
Technological applications of ecosan:
- Urine-diversion dehydration (UDD) toilets
- Composting
- Rainwater harvesting
- Constructed wetlands
- Vacuum sewers
- Biogas reactors
