Blue Diversion: A New Approach To Sanitation In Informal Settlements

The sanitation concept ‘Blue Diversion’ (www.bluediversiontoilet.com) was developed as a possible answer to the sanitation crisis in urban slums. It is based on two main elements: (1) diversion of urine, feces, and water at the source as the basis for efficient resource recovery, and (2) linking different scales (family toilets and semi-centralized resource recovery). Our objective was to develop an attractive ‘grid-free’ (i.e. functioning without piped water, sewer, and electrical grid) dry urine-diverting toilet, which provides water (through recycling on-site) for flushing, personal hygiene (anal cleansing and menstrual hygiene), and hand washing. This service, including the entire sanitation value chain, should eventually be made available as a profitable business with total user fees of 5 ¢/p/d. The results presented in this paper are (1) a toilet design model, (2) the development of a new type of membrane bioreactor for treating flush and wash water, (3) main results of a geographic information system-based stochastic service model to link the family-scale toilet to a community-scale Resource Recovery Plant, and (4) a business model that yields maximum profit for the local community. We conclude that the approach is feasible, but challenging from a technical as well as an organizational point of view.

Keywords

innovation, resource recovery, source separation, toilet design, urban, wastewater treatment

Citation

Larsen, T. A., Gebauer, H., Gründl, H., Künzle, R., Lüthi, C., Messmer, U., ... & Ranner, B. (2015). Blue diversion: a new approach to sanitation in informal settlements. Journal of Water, sanitation and Hygiene for Development, 5(1), 64-71.https://doi.org/10.2166/washdev.2014.115

URI

https://nru.uncst.go.ug/xmlui/handle/123456789/1783

Collections

Engineering and Technology

Full item page