RILES Composting Toilet in Puerto Morelos, Mexico

A view inside the bathroom of the RILES Composting Toilet

Killer Sanitation: The Paradox Revealed with Solutions

by Laura Orlando & Penny Fujiko Willgerodt

In late October 1995, in the small town of Greenland, New Hampshire, Wheelabrator Water Technologies, Inc. dumped 650 tons of sewage sludge on Rosamond Hughes' field. After sitting for several days, the sludge was dragged across the field's surface with a tractor, and then spread repeatedly for the next three weeks. As it dried, it was blown by steady winds toward the home of 26-year-old Shayne Conner, 300 feet away.

Almost immediately, Conner, his family, and their neighbors began to get sick. Overcome by the stench, they started vomiting. They felt burning sensations in their eyes, throats and lungs. They experienced nosebleeds, headaches, congestion, fever and nausea. They had difficulty breathing. And then, on a quiet day in November––less than one month after the sludge was dumped on the Hughes' property––Shayne Conner died.

There have been at least two other cases of human death attributed to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulated sewage sludge. In 1994, Tony Behun, an eleven-year-old boy from Pennsylvania, rode his bike through a field where sludge was dumped. Soon afterwards, he became ill with skin lesions, fever, and respiratory problems. He died from kidney failure four days later. Russell and Antoinette Pennock’s seventeen-year-old son, Daniel, died in 1995 of a massive bacterial infection after walking on a field where sewage sludge had been applied. Though the EPA has no system to track and respond to health complaints related to exposure to sewage sludge, over three hundred and fifty people have reported sludge-based health incidents to the Cornell Waste Management Institute alone.

In the wealthiest country in the world, people are dying from the industrial end product of state-of-the-art sewage treatment systems. In the Global South, 2.4 billion people have no access to any kind of sanitary waste management. What this translates into, among other horrors, is a child dying every 10 seconds because of inadequate sanitation. Bill McKibben noted that this “steady drip, drip, drip of daily dying has not lead to a political crisis,” and instead is “more like background noise.” Some background noise.

SLUDGE

Sewage sludge is the inevitable byproduct of sewage treatment, created in the attempt to retrieve clean water from sewage. The more thorough the attempt to clean the sewer water, the more thoroughly noxious the residue—the sludge—will be. Sludge routinely contains industrial wastes, hospital wastes, heavy metals, and synthetic organic compounds (e.g., PCBs, PBDEs and dioxin), as well as human fecal waste. There are as many as 100,000 chemicals used in American industry, and every year about a thousand new chemical compounds are put into commercial use. All of these can potentially enter the wastewater stream, and any that do can end up in the sludge.

In 1993, EPA initiated its sewage sludge regulatory program and, along with it, an aggressive program to promote sludge as a “safe” fertilizer to farmers and the public. Part of this effort included EPA’s introduction of the public relations term “biosolids,” which it uses interchangeably with the technical term “sewage sludge.”
The EPA categorically denies that land applied sewage sludge is harmful. But the claim of harm to animals and land was litigated to judgment by at least one court in the United States. In June 2003, a Georgia Superior Court ruled in Boyceland Dairy v. City of Augusta that the deaths of 300 dairy cows on the Boyceland Dairy farm were caused by sewage sludge. The hay fed to the prize-winning cows had been grown on land where sludge had been applied in conformance with EPA rules.
In a 2002 report, the EPA’s own Office of the Inspector General concluded that, “EPA cannot assure the public that current land application practices are protective of human health and the environment." Meanwhile, in 2002 alone, over 5 million dry tons of sludge was put on American farmland.

What we do with sludge now is a public health and environmental disaster.

Why is the United States so invested in the sewers and sewage treatment plants that produce toxic sludge? Since passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, many communities have had no choice but to put in sewers and build expensive sewage treatment plants. The resulting multi-billion dollar sewering effort created a powerful wastewater industry. The EPA, while ostensibly charged with protecting the environment, caters to that industry and other corporate interests.

The disposal of sludge is the immediate problem with which we are faced; sewers and central sewage treatment plants that must unceasingly produce sludge is the deeper problem. Using water as a transportation medium for waste materials was the fundamental mistake that gave rise to so destructive and unfixable a sequence of mistaken technologies: sewers leading to vast water pollution; vast water pollution leading to sewage treatment; sewage treatment leading to the production of an unusable mix of all the pollutants that treatment could remove—sludge, the climax inherent in sewers and the water carriage of wastes. The spending of resources—time, energy, materials, money—on upgrading the level of wastewater treatment, on the construction of sewerage, or on efforts to “clean up” sludge, can be no more than a waste of all those resources. The time and energy and money should be spent instead on developing systems that do not cause the problems caused by sewers.

What can and should be done immediately, and where should we be heading?

First, there should be a federal ban on land spreading of sewage sludge. No regulatory “fixing,” but instead an outright ban on this disposal method, as demanded by 73 farm, food safety, and environmental organizations that petitioned the EPA in October 2003.

Second, to solve the problem of the few septic systems that are failing in the thousands of communities across the country that rely on septic systems: do not sewer. Instead, install on-site remediation technologies; there are many already on the market, these including upgraded septic systems that are superior in their ability to prevent or abate pollution. The advantages of a sewer-avoidance program are great. Pollution problems can first be dealt with locally, at their source, where it is possible to focus on the worst polluters and actual failures. Real capital and maintenance costs are always much less for on-site systems than for central sewering and treatment. With on-site treatment, development of communities is not bound to the rigid grid of sewer lines; and most importantly, the problem of water pollution becomes solvable instead of merely movable.

Third, in those cities and towns already sewered, implement a back-off-the-sewer program. That is, begin the process of intercepting—and recovering for recycling—resources as close to the source as possible. We must begin by changing the Clean Water Act, which now funds sewers and treatment plants, so that federal funding is made available for research into technologies necessary for the separation, recovery, and recycling—at the source—of industrial wastes. We must begin the work of turning the Clean Water Act into a pollution prevention act. Certainly as long as there are sewers, controlling industrial wastes will not by itself solve the sludge problem. However, it will reduce the range and quantity of materials entering the sewage stream and thereby both decrease the burden on central treatment facilities and the volume and toxicity of sludge produced. The aim here, too, is to move away altogether from water carriage of wastes and the hopeless tasks it entails.

SANITATION CRISIS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

One of the Millennium Development Goals affirmed at the 2000 Earth Summit in Johannesburg is to halve the proportion of people who do not have access to basic sanitation by 2015. The vast majority of these people live in the Global South. To achieve this target, an additional 2.2 billion people will need access to sanitation, or to put it in more salient terms, sanitation facilities will have to be provided to 384,000 people every day for 15 years.

“Providing sanitation facilities” is akin to saying, “plugging the ozone hole.” One might be fooled into thinking there is a single fix, but these problems demand a complex mix of solutions. It is as much about policy and economics as it is about technology and education. And it is not only about ending the drip, drip, drip of daily dying, but also about acknowledging sustainable sanitation’s contribution to individual dignity and human rights. Gro Harlem Brundtl, former Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) and Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) wrote that: “Access to safe water and to sanitary means of excreta disposal are universal needs and, indeed, basic human rights. They are essential elements of human development and poverty alleviation and constitute an indispensable component of primary health care…Inadequate sanitation, hygiene and water result not only in more sickness and death, but also in higher health costs, lower worker productivity, lower school enrolment and retention rates of girls and, perhaps most importantly, the denial of the rights of all people to live in dignity.”

When it comes to investing in sanitation, however, bringing health and dignity to poor people is not high on the list. The lion's share of such investment goes to sewerage in urban areas, subsidizing services for industrial development, the middle class, and the rich. During the UN-declared International Water and Sanitation Decade (1980-1990), funding for sanitation skyrocketed. But according to Frank Hartvelt, deputy director of the Science and Technology Private Sector Division of the UN Development Programme, 80% of all investment went to "well-off urban areas, for expensive installations."

If the World Water Commission has its way, expensive installations might not always mean sewers. In 1998, the UN set up the World Water Commission to examine water issues. In its Vision Report, published in 2000, the Commission identified what it called "a vital need for high tech innovation." As an example of this, the Report suggested "the use of computer chips to control the digestion process in smart-composting toilets." Good for Intel: bad for the nearly three billion people without any toilet. The digestion process in composting toilets needs carbon––chopped leaves or wood chips––not silicon.

People in the Global South live in a world rich enough to afford a universal level of sanitation that would help to protect their health and welfare. But regardless of how much money is available, we will trade one set of problems for another unless we radically rethink how that money is spent.

A MODEL FOR SUSTAINABLE SANITATION

The truth is, neither sewers nor computer chips in composting toilets are functionally or environmentally sustainable. Instead, what is needed are sanitation systems that keep toxic and human wastes separate, prevent pollution, and return the nutrients in urine and feces to the soil as fertilizers. Small projects have demonstrated systems that accomplish these goals while also being culturally appropriate, locally responsible, affordable, functional, and even beautiful.

One example can be found on the Caribbean coast of Mexico, a fragile ecosystem that is home to 600,000 people and four million tourists. Since 1993, the ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems (RILES)––a nonprofit concerned with sanitation––has built about 400 composting toilets in the Yucatan Peninsula. Most are paid for by their owners: maids, gardeners, masons, carpenters, schoolteachers, doctors, editors, tourism operators, hotels, municipalities, and retired Americans, to name a few. All of them are functioning well. Word has spread that they have no smell, do not fill up, can be in the house or outside, and can be hooked to a water toilet or not; that there is somebody around who knows how to maintain them; and that there are people who will gladly take away and use the fertilizer that these systems produce. The fact that these composting toilets are also beautiful is no small part of their success. The first few were built in houses with dirt floors, but soon wealthy people with beachfront homes wanted them. Because of their aesthetic appeal, the toilets have won acceptance across class boundaries. In an effort to build a local infrastructure to keep up with demand and maintain quality control, RILES is establishing three Mexican corporations: a company to prefabricate the composting toilets; a workers' cooperative to install and maintain them, while providing custom bathroom construction for interested clients; and a nonprofit organization to carry out education and policy-related work.

Why not just hand out blueprints and leave it at that?

It doesn't work; it has been demonstrated over and over again that there is an infinite number of ways to build a composting toilet so that it does not function well. Training and supervision take care of this, and regular maintenance keeps the toilets working. Homeowners need support for these things. Add to this the fact that there is a social change element to the project, and you can see why a blueprint won't do the trick.

Though do-it-yourself construction can be an effective way to get some on-site systems built for low-income households, many other components are needed to bring these efforts to scale. Providing sustainable sanitation technologies for billions of people will require replacing the existing engineering and financial infrastructure that currently supports sewerage with one that supports ecological innovations in waste treatment.
That, in turn, will require significant fiscal and political commitments by governments, new policies that adhere to basic ground rules for sustainable sanitation, and organizations – nonprofit, for-profit, and combinations of both––that are committed to recasting global sanitation. And whatever the technology, people will have to want it.

What is needed is a new approach consisting of:

• principles that put source separation first in the decision-making hierarchy;
• people who approach sanitation from both a health and ecological perspectives;
• financing––both private and public––to develop production and marketing capabilities;
• easy access by those who want sustainable sanitation technologies to those who can deliver, install and maintain them;
• financial packages to help people pay for toilets; and
• government policies that punish polluters, reward ecological innovators, and promote and help pay for universal sustainable sanitation coverage.

The fact that half of the people in the world do not have a toilet reflects government priorities that are politically and morally bankrupt. The fact that the other half has little or no access to sustainable sanitation reflects misconceptions about conventional sanitation systems and what they can and cannot do. Under the current system, everyone suffers. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Laura Orlando is a civil engineer, executive director of the ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems (http://www.riles.org), and associate director of the Program for the Ecology of Human Systems at the Boston University School of Public Health. She has been working on sustainable sanitation issues in the US and abroad for over 15 years. She can be contacted at orlando@riles.org or 617-524-7258. Penny Fujiko Willgerodt is a vice president & senior philanthropic advisor with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.