Sanitation remains one of the most off-track Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with 3.4 billion people, about 46 percent of the world’s population, still without access to safe sanitation facilities.
Approaches such as Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) have helped shift countries towards Open Defection Free (ODF) status. Declarations on achievement of ODF status in countries like India and Nepal in 2019 were momentous and politically strategic, unfortunately multiple studies and assessments show that millions of people in these countries are still defecating in the open.
One promising message that can possibly trigger innovations around the sanitation crisis — is that ‘shit’ is not waste, but instead a basic resource for a trillion-dollar global industry. A circular economy approach of resource recovery and reuse holds the promise of human shit becoming ‘Brown Gold’ through upcycling into energy (biogas production), agricultural (biomass fertiliser) and many more industrial outputs, even (potentially) fuelling shit-powered flight. In addition, huge amounts of water can be recovered from human waste, as faecal matter alone is 75 percent water, and urine is essentially 95 percent water. All told, in India alone, the predicted market for waste recovery and re-use is as large as USD$9–28 billion.
While these solutions are potentially promising, questions remain: are these interventions viable, and, more importantly, is this the direction that will solve the sanitation crisis of nearly half the world’s poorest population — who have no safe and sustainable sanitation at all?
Building on evidence from field research in India, Nepal, Ghana and Ethiopia, the Towards Brown Gold project highlights three key issues for urgent consideration in currently popular framings of the sanitation circular economy (SCE).
1. Constructing toilets does not resolve the sanitation crisis
The ODF initiative resulted in the construction of millions of low-cost toilets without plans for managing the ‘shit’. Constructed in crowded or remote locations, they are costly and challenging to empty. Unlined sanitation pits result in the leaking of faecal waste into the soil and have been shown to contaminate groundwater (used for drinking and domestic use) both in dry and wet seasons. In many cases, these toilets fill up in a few months. Invariably this is the situation of newly ODF claimed poor and marginalised communities who are then left to somehow deal with a situation not far from a ‘ticking shit-bomb’ crisis. In other words, there is nothing ‘circular’ about CLTS and ODF and this is increasingly ‘behind the curve’ on global development thinking.
“There is nothing ‘circular’ about CLTS and ODF”
The majority of people lacking safe sanitation are almost all off-grid; in other words, they lack access to networked sewerage. This is not a problem in itself and theoretically can provide the opportunity for sanitation innovations, but this is not simple. Gulariya, a rapidly growing locality in Nepal’s Terai region was one of the first ODF declared municipalities in Nepal in 2015, and had the rare distinction of having a local waste treatment plant. Our research has revealed that that problems of managing off-grid sanitation persist, safe containment and disposal of faeces is expensive and difficult to organise. Also arrangements for personal protective equipment are limited both for individual households and sanitation workers. The continual leaching of contaminated water and pathogens impacts water and soil quality exposing marginalised communities to health risks.
This was the recurring experience in our other research locations in India, Ghana and Ethiopia. In small and medium-sized towns many marginalised communities have been offered poorly designed and constructed toilets. In high population density areas safe collection and treatment of faeces remains a technical challenge, even when facilities exist for the uptake and access to an ideal of municipal services.
2. Local and indigenous methods must be included
The concept of a sanitation circular economy is promising. However, a critical reflection provides a simple insight: a reuse approach is often the coping strategy of marginalised societies, who need to effectively make do with the limited resources available to them for survival. To what extent does this grand promise of a sanitation circular economy consider viability and scalability of social and technical sub-systems at different scales and timeframes? And how far does it build of local and indigenous experience that already exists rather than imposing new structures?
Given the lack of attention to these processes of change required at different levels, a study of five urban centres in India shows the unlikelihood of new and emerging ODF communities transitioning to being part of the grand solutions of sanitation-driven entrepreneurship. In sanitation unserved communities, the challenges are still essentially about achieving and sustaining the public health benefits of safe sanitation. Achieving this SDG goal, as well as much more besides, will require a massive realigning of formal and informal systems, structures and finances.
3. Sanitation Circular Economy is silent on sanitation workers’ rights
Expert-driven, technocentric circular economy approaches pay little attention to the crucial roles paid by mostly poor and marginalised formal and informal sanitation workers in local municipalities. The situation is particularly challenging in South Asia, where for centuries, a discriminatory caste system links Dalits with the collection and disposal of sanitary wastes.
While constitutional amendments have corrected this discrimination and legislation mandates the provision of personal protective equipment, this rarely happens in practice. The long struggle of India’s sanitation workers known as Safai Karmacharis (cleaning workers) regularly brought into contact with human waste causes diseases like cholera, bronchitis, and tuberculosis, as well as daily encounters with the noxious gases including hydrogen sulphide which can blind, and carbon monoxide which can kill.
The situation in South Asia is complicated by caste, yet an assessment across Asia, Africa and Latin America shows that sanitation workers in nine countries deal with locked, blocked, or filthy toilets, overflowing septic tanks, or beaches contaminated with sewage, their work is often invisible and too often in their daily work they are subject to the worst consequences of poor sanitation: debilitating infections, injuries, social stigma and even death.
Sanitation circular economy plans are worryingly silent on the human dignity of sanitation work. Mechanising faecal sludge management could be an alternative but in reality, our research in India and Nepal shows poor faecal sludge management facilities or the taking away of sanitation work, the only employment available to Dalits who struggle to get work outside their traditional occupations.
In sum, there are many significant and urgent challenges to overcome in moving towards achieving SDG 6 and, ultimately, realising ‘brown gold’. A sanitation circular economy is a potential route to these goals, but by itself — it is seemingly flawed in its inattention to issues of inclusion of those most affected by the lack of services, as well as those engaged as service providers in the handling and management of shit. We call for a shift to a co-aligned approach of a sanitation circular and solidarity economy which explores innovative economic solutions for the most basic of human needs in ways that are wired for inclusivity, in ways that do not prioritize economic returns over unmet sanitation goals and the human dignity of sanitation work.
