Sanitation Updates

Hetauda: The Water Treatment Plant, constructed two years ago by Environment Area Assistance Programme (ESPS)* with financial aid worth Rs. 550 million from the Danish Government, is not in full operation. Only 15 per cent capacity of the treatment plant is under operation as some of the big industries producing wastewater in the industrial area are closed and some industries have not constructed underground sewerage to send their wastewater in the plant. Most of the industries connected with the plant produce little wastewater.

Read more: Kantipur / NGO Forum, 23 Apr 2008

* “Environment Sector Programme Support (ESPS) came to an end on 30 June 2005 as the government to goverment agreement expired. However, Danida confirmed its support for the operation and maintenance of Waste Treatment Plant (WWTP) and Air Quality Management (AQM) Components of ESPS in a sliding scale of 70%, 50% and 30% for their sustainability for the period of three years i.e. until February 2009″. [Source: Embassy of Denmark, Kathamandu]

A big housing development project is bringing ecological sanitation toilets that do not require water, to a water-scarce municipality in the northern region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The largest urban project of its kind in the PRC, the project also boasts of an onsite eco-station complete with greywater treatment and thermal composting of organic materials. Will there be enough takers to ensure the sustainability of this project and the concept of ecotown?

The Erdos Eco-Town Project (EETP) - a collaborative enterprise of the Dongsheng District of the Erdos Municipal government, Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), and a private real estate developer (Daxing Co. Ltd.)- is the world’s first major attempt to build an entire town with onsite ecological sanitation (ecosan).

Read more: ADB, Apr 2008

The Yamuna is the largest tributary of the revered Ganges, but its polluted waters pose an increasing health hazard to the Indian capital. Now campaigners are calling for urgent action to clean it up.

The Yamuna, which passes through Delhi, represents both a terrible irony and one of India’s great unsung scandals. The largest tributary of the revered Ganges, the Yamuna is one of the country’s most sacred rivers, and yet perhaps also its dirtiest. Hundreds of millions of pounds of public and private money has been spent on projects to clean the river and yet where it passes Delhi it is dark, stinking and lifeless - as dead as a handful of ashes.

“It’s a terrible irony. In the Hindu religion we are supposed to venerate rivers. The Yamuna is one of the most worshipped,” said Vimlendu Jha, who heads a campaign group called We For Yamuna. “And yet every day 950 million gallons of sewage is pumped into the river. The faecal coliform [bacteria from human waste] count is 100,000 times what is considered safe for bathing… No politician wants to do anything. It has gone from bad to worse.”

Read more: Andrew Buncombe, The Independent, 01 May 2008

By Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor

(…)  Until that day their home was just downhill from a deep pond of sewage, pumped into a depression in the dunes and held there by earth walls because the water authorities in the Gaza Strip had nowhere else to put it.

‘Wall of human waste’ 

On 27 March 2007, the walls gave way. Aziza heard someone shouting, telling her to run away. She got out of the hut, then went back in because she had forgotten her head covering. The wall of raw human waste slammed into them. It knocked her down and tore the baby from her arms. 

(…)

Read all //news.bbc.co.uk

BY CHRISTINE KRALY. ckraly@nwitimes.com, 219.662.5335 | Sunday, April 20, 2008

In addition to the industrial complexes dotting the lakefront, municipal sanitation sites also expel millions of pounds of chemicals and treated wastewater into the Lake Michigan basin every year.
And some Calumet Region and Chicago-area municipalities are allowed to discharge far greater volumes of pollutants into the lake and its waterways than the more criticized industries, an eight-month Times investigation of Lake Michigan pollution shows. (…)

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Only 3.5% of Costa Rica’s wastewater is treated before being discharged into the country’s rivers, water utility AyA chairman Ricardo Sancho said. Costa Rica has only five operating wastewater treatment plants, which can only serve one-third of the population. The San Isidro treatment plant, in Choluteca municipality, has collapsed while Limón province only has a sea outfall pipe.

Source: BNamericas.com [subscription site], 7 Apr 2008

Industries in Peru will have to accommodate environmental standards for wastewater treatment set by developed countries, otherwise they cannot export their products, said José Salazar, president of Sunass, the national water authority. To comply with the free trade agreement with the USA, Peru also needs to raise industrial water use rates. A study on water rate revision must be ready by the end of 2008.

Source: BNamericas.com [subscription site], 1 Apr 2008

Ecological management of human excreta and urine would not only help keep the environment clean and the people safe from many diseases but also meet the entire need of fertiliser for agriculture, a workshop on water supply and ecological sanitation was told in Dhaka yesterday.

The workshop, organised by the Bangladesh Water Partnership (BWP) in observance of the World Water Day 2008, at the LGED auditorium, was attended by leading water experts and representatives of government, non-governmenal organisations and international agencies involved in the water sanitation sector.

Read More - The New Nation

BULAWAYO, 14 March 2008 (IRIN) - To get to Sinikiwe MaKhumalo’s doorstep in Zimbabwe’s second largest city, Bulawayo, visitors have to step on a thin plank perched precariously over a trench that prevents sewage from flowing into her house.  The 57-year-old grandmother has endured this arrangement to access her home in the city’s Old Magwegwe working class suburb for the past five months after a sewer burst close to her residence.

The city’s unsanitary conditions has left residents fearful of a fresh outbreak of cholera. The last outbreak occurred at the height of a water crisis in 2007 when close to 300 people were hospitalised and 11 died as a result of drinking contaminated water.

Most families can no longer afford standard toilet paper and instead use newspapers or torn pieces of cardboard boxes. They also river sand to clean their pots instead of commercial, soluble, scouring powders. Both practices lead to sewer blockages.

Read more: IRIN, 14 Mar 2008