Changing the Language We Use About Handling, Well, to Put It Graphically, Shit: Describing Sanitation Systems.

[NNadir]

The paper to which I will refer in this post is this one: Urban Sanitation: New Terminology for Globally Relevant Solutions? Linda Strande, Barbara Evans, Marcos von Sperling, Jamie Bartram, Hidenori Harada, Anne Nakagiri, and Viet-Anh Nguyen Environmental Science & Technology 2023 57 (42), 15771-15779.

The paper is available to the public, open sourced, and anyone can read it. I will nonetheless briefly excerpt it below.

There's a marvelous little book I read some time ago that sticks in my mind; I wouldn't mind reading it again. It's called "The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters." The author is Rose George. Ms. George is one of those magnificent journalists, as opposed to the horrible generic practitioners of journalism, who now dominate the field, ("but her emails"..."the war on terror"...etc.) who recalls Spinoza's famous remark:

Thus the task is not so much to see what no one has seen yet, but to think what nobody has thought yet, about what everybody sees.

The issue of human fecal waste and the related issue of its transport and treatment - or as the case for well more than a billion human beings, lack of treatment - is one of the major health and environmental issues facing humanity today, subsumed perhaps by many other, often greater, issues.

I think about it often and have often linked this page when writing on this website: WHO, Sanitation

Over 1.5 billion people still do not have basic sanitation services, such as private toilets or latrines.
Of these, 419 million still defecate in the open, for example in street gutters, behind bushes or into open bodies of water.
In 2020, 44% of the household wastewater generated globally was discharged without safe treatment (1).

It turns out that sewage is potentially, like many systems we think of as "waste" an important source of important resources if, and only if properly processed, one of the most important being of course water, but almost as important, phosphorous, as well, to a more limited extent carbon.

The authors of this paper have raised the point of how we use language to deal with this very important issue.

Some excerpts:

Improvements in urban sanitation in the 19th and 20th centuries in Europe and North America resulted in significant inhibition of the spread of infectious disease. Subsequently, centralized waterborne sanitation was ranked as one of the top medical and engineering achievements of the 20th century. (1,2) However, urban development and sewers have not always progressed hand in hand. In Harappa (modern day Pakistan), underground sewers for conveying human excreta were built as early as 3000 BC, with every house having a flush toilet. (3) Since then, sanitation services have fluctuated with changes in civilizations, from the Cloaca Maxima in ancient Rome to no central sewer in London until the end of the 19th century. (2) Diverse improvements have been made with flush toilets, piped sewers, and wastewater treatment, but this impetus has not been sufficient to solve the sanitation challenge on a worldwide basis. Currently, only 64% of urban residents globally are served by sewers, (4) and it is not known how much wastewater actually receives effective treatment. (5) The flush toilet is considered the gold standard as it conveniently removes feces and urine from sight and smell, but without adequate capture and conveyance, community-scale health and environmental benefits are obviously not achieved. This sanitation challenge in urban areas is increasing with rapidly growing cities (e.g., increase of 1.3 billion people between 2000 and 2017), (6) along with climate change, water scarcity, and migration. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets and sanitation as a human right are severely impeded by cultural reluctance, profound misconceptions, and honest ignorance, and achieving them will require us to overcome barriers that are preventing the roll out of appropriate solutions.

Research and practice efforts are often focused on advancing solutions at treatment facilities, (7) but the protection of public health in urban areas relies as heavily on capture and conveyance to treatment, to avoid pathogen exposure at the source of production. The objective of this paper is to challenge common misconceptions around global paradigms for the management of sanitation, focusing on capture and conveyance to treatment. We postulate that these misconceptions lead to misinformed decisions that hamper progress in access to services in high-density urban areas and have profound detrimental downstream effects...

...Why Does Terminology Matter?

The World Health Organisation categorizes sewer-based and rural land-based solutions as “established”, (13) meaning that technologies are reliably understood to the level where globally accepted guidelines exist on how to design, build, and operate them. Research into activated sludge has been taking place for more than 100 years, (7) and guidelines for land-based treatment with septic tanks (14) and pit latrines (15) have been in place for more than 70 years.

By contrast, solutions for full and safe management of sanitation in urban areas that rely on at source storage and road-based transport remain mostly as “emerging” or “transferring” solutions. (13) This mode of service provision is widespread and rapidly gaining acknowledgment as a viable solution, although solutions have not yet been established. This is increasingly called “fecal sludge management” or “FSM” in the development sector, but the term is poorly defined...

...1. Septic Tanks and Pit Latrines in Urban Areas Are in Fact Not Septic Tanks and Pit Latrines...

...2. Existing Categories Are Not Analogous to “Safely Managed Sanitation”...

....4. Wastewater Streams from Human Feces Are Not All the Same, and This Has Significant Impacts on Treatment...

If you really want to know about the world in which we live, you could do worse than reading this paper.

Have a nice weekend.