Sanitation Without Sewers

In much of the world, people do not have access to toilets and sewers. To make these places safer, innovators look for cheap, easy-to-install solutions.

1 minute read

September 29, 2017, 11:00 AM PDT

By Casey Brazeal @northandclark


Outhouse

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"Worldwide, 2.3 billion people don’t have access to a toilet," Alia Dharssi reports for Next City. Because traditional sewage systems can be expensive and take time to build, inventors are looking for ways to give people access to sanitary toilets without them.

Inspired by seeing this issue first hand in Bangladesh, Daigo Ishiyama took on the challenge. "Ishiyama and his team developed a line of cheap plastic toilets with self-closing trapdoors that separate people using latrines from the sewage beneath them," Dharssi reports.  

Another group, based out of Kenya, engineered a different solution. "Sanivation installs container-based toilets in homes in informal settlements in Naivasha, a city of north of Nairobi, for free, hauls away the sludge from them for a small monthly fee and processes the waste into fuel briquettes," Dharssi writes.

Tuesday, September 26, 2017 in Next City

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