On 2/25/2021 1:03 AM, [email protected] wrote:
... what I'm seeing is a sort of displacement where supplements and
fertilisation -- if not of manufactured chemical origin -- is
harvested from human manures, especially urine. If there is a
technological fix worth pursuing, that's it: getting human piss and
shit back to the fields. In ancient China there was even a market in
the stuff.
Dave, no objection in principle - and some of the most advanced analysis
of sewage piping is actually by a marxist geographer, Erik Swyngedouw
<https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/erik.swyngedouw.html> (my
office-mate 35 years ago during PhD studies), who keeps innovating in
urban political ecology. But be wary when it comes to the devils in the
details of implementation, especially where our version of
semi-peripheral capitalism's peri-urban race, gender, class and
geographical power relations amp up uneven and combined development to
levels you may not have imagined possible but that are abundantly
evident at the scale of the body.
If interested, drawing on my favorite city's foibles, here
<https://sci-hub.se/downloads/2020-01-27/4f/[email protected]#view=FitH>
is a long analysis of "Tokenistic water and neoliberal sanitation in
post-apartheid Durban" published in the /Journal of Contemporary African
Studies /last year. Just the crucial section, below, shows how the
Gates-style and Gates-funded tech fixes in South Africa's third major
city is one of the world's most advanced in imposing neoliberal
strategies, with predictable sorry results.
The key 'graf:
Several silver-bullet technological fixes emerged, including a 2010
pilot project which paid low-income residents for
collection/recycling of urine from UDs in view of a coming “peak
phosphate” problem faced in commercial agriculture ($4/month per
household). In 2015, some municipal officials proposed converting
the UDs into low-flush systems with mini-septic tanks. However, in
2016, a more attractive option for the city emerged within an
innovative biopolitical strategy: maintaining the UDs without any
changes, but hiring outsourced workers to empty the waste (‘sludge’)
from UD sites, for trucking to a large sewage treatment plant in
South Durban. There, according to designers Nick Alcock /et al/,
thanks to a $1.3 million Gates Foundation grant, Durban would
attempt “the breeding of Black Soldier Fly Larvae (BSFL) to process
the waste.” One Gates-funded academic study in 2014 “found the use
of BSFL could provide a solution to the health problems associated
with poor sanitation and inadequate human waste management in
developing countries… the prepupae produced have a value that could
provide a source of income for communities or local entrepreneurs”.
A /Nature /journal reporter was enthusiastic: “The factories
dehydrate the larvae to make an animal feed or extract a fatty oil,
which has a range of uses from cosmetics to bio-diesel. The leftover
organic matter becomes a soil conditioner.”
In reality, it was a failure in every respect, if you want context and
further details:
***
(Section excerpt from longer /JCAS /article)
*Urine diversion beyond the ‘Sanitation Edge’*
Starting at the level of the household, Durban's Ethekwini Water and
Sanitation (EWS) leader Neil Macleod (2008a, 2) acknowledged that with
the city’s expansion in 2001, there were 200,000 families – roughly a
third of the population – without basic sanitation. Many lived beyond
what was initially termed ‘the sanitation edge’, a vast peripheral band
of the municipality in which Macleod deemed it fiscally unrealistic to
lay sewage lines (Figure 1). Much of this area was in the vicinity of
the Inanda Dam so there was no physical water shortage to be concerned
with, only the power and width of water supply piping and the proximity
of sewage treatment facilities.
At that stage, in 2008, Durban had 60,000 pit latrine toilets – without
a water supply to flush – that had filled up to the point they could no
longer be used. The city was unable to fulfill its commitment to a “free
basic sanitation service in the form of one pit emptying every five
years,” Macleod (2008a, 7) conceded at the 2008 Africa Sanitation
conference in Durban. Indeed many pits were unlined; the “toilets [were]
subject to catastrophic collapse”; many were “constructed in
inaccessible locations”; and there was high variability in content, size
and cost of emptying. According to Simphiwe Nojiyeza and Baruti Amisi
(2008, 2), Durban then still suffered from “148,688 pit latrines without
ventilation as well as 41,880 chemical toilets. Bucket latrines have
been reduced to 9270.” VIPs were increasingly filling up but not being
emptied not only in Durban but across South Africa.
Yet the world’s richest man, philanthropist Bill Gates (2010), visited
these sites and reported on his blog page, “Neal [sic] showed me the VIP
toilet – which isn’t as fancy as its name suggests, but is a
breakthrough in basic sanitation through the use of simple ventilation
methods and other inexpensive construction methods, such as installing a
fly screen on the ventilation pipe.” To be sure, The VIP was an
improvement over regular pit latrines, dating to its design by Peter
Morgan (2013 Stockholm award winner) during the early 1970s in rural
Zimbabwe, which allowed odors to escape and also prevented flies from
spreading disease. But internal semi-darkness posed a disincentive to
use especially for children, and the continual need to empty pits became
too expensive. The cost of emptying each pit averaged $120 per pit,
compared to “the cost of constructing new single Ventilated Improved
Pit-latrine (VIP) type toilets: $140 to $420”, according to Macleod
(2008a, 7), making the emptying process “uneconomic.”
As a result, Macleod (2008a, 7) turned to another water-less technology:
“double pit, urine diversion (UD) toilets, outside the urban edge.” This
in turn permitted further transfer of sanitation maintenance
responsibilities away from the state. As Gounden et al (2013) explain,
“The UD toilet consisting of two chambers is constructed above or
slightly below ground. The pedestal is designed to allow urine to flow
to a soak away, while the faecal matter collects in the first chamber…
The householder is required to remove the contents, dig a hole and bury
the contents on site. The pedestal is moved back to the now empty first
chamber”[1] <#_ftn1> (Figure 2).
For the UD technology to prevent contamination of the solid with the
liquid requires consistent hygienic education. Contamination is a
frequent problem, in a context of high rates of diarrhea (oftentimes
associated with AIDS-related opportunistic diseases, since Durban has
the world’s highest level of urban HIV+ prevalence), humid weather,
hilly slopes, poor drainage and turbulent rain. Nevertheless, according
to Macleod (2008a, 8), the 63,000 new UD toilets constructed by 2008
were “able to be emptied by households at an affordable cost” and they
used “minimum amounts of water, if at all.” (Indeed the UD is designed
to /not /use any flushing mechanism.) Ultimately more than 85,000 UDs
were imposed on residents in these areas.
Macleod (2008b) explained, “A piped sewerage system is not economically
justifiable in rural areas, where the densities are too low, and in
these areas onsite sanitation is the only viable option available.” The
capital cost of each UD toilet was an average of $500, but municipal
maintenance costs fell away because “emptying is the responsibility of
the household, with entrepreneurs already offering their services at $4
per chamber emptied” (Macleod 2008a, 8-9). As Barbara Penner (2010)
observed, however, Macleod’s “preference for self-contained sanitation
options is also clearly consistent with a more troubling pattern in the
world’s water and sanitation community, where costs and maintenance
responsibilities are being shifted onto users as a matter of
(neoliberal) policy.”
Yet Macleod (2008a, 8-11) claimed that “follow-up visits after
construction have increased acceptance levels and emphasised the
family’s responsibilities for maintenance of the toilet. The period
needed for follow ups extends to years” because of the need to “evaluate
acceptance of the solution and to confirm that the hygiene messages have
been internalised.” Not only were civil society critics increasingly
vocal (Galvin and Nojiyeza 2011), but studies by even Macleod’s allies
in 2013, 2014 and 2017 contradicted the claim of consumer acceptance.
Yet it was this innovation that had most impressed a /Science
/journalist (Koenig 2008, 744) who in 2008 termed UD the “best solution”
to Durban’s sanitation challenge. The UD will become “the future of
toilet technology” in the Third World, according to a London /Guardian
/report (Kaye 2012). Here, endorsements of sanitation neoliberalism –
both in Durban and in international water management – overlap, but
without reference (in either /Science /or /The Guardian/) to social
dissent.
For various reasons, complaints about UDs became increasingly common,
including near the Inanda Dam where Durban’s main water reserves are
stored. As community organiser Dudu Khumalo remarked about the
Umzinyathi and KwaNgcolosi pilot communities, “These communities are
repelled by human excrement as fertiliser, because of the many diseases
surrounding them, compared to cow-dung. The burden of cleaning is left
to women. Other creative opportunities for bio-gas are also foreclosed
by UDs” (Bond 2019). Journalists at Durban’s /Daily News /picked up the
story in mid-2010: “Local residents who complained are aghast, not only
at the unbearable stench, but the thought of digging out their own waste
and using it on their vegetable patches” (Adriaan, Ngcobo and Mngoma 2010).
By 2013, a municipal/academic survey of 17,000 recipients of the UD
toilet made it evident that the system had failed, and a new strategy
would be required (Roma /et al /2013; Coertzen 2014). Fully 99 percent
of respondents observed that a flush toilet inside their house would be
optimal; many used the flush toilet at work in the city but when back in
peri-urban home areas were unhappy about substandard sanitation. Foul
smells were the biggest problem, causing 80 percent dissatisfaction. On
the one hand, diarrhoea reports suggested a 40 percent improvement, as a
result of having access to sanitation, but on the other hand, the fact
that widespread diarhhoea made drying excrement difficult especially in
the humid summer months wasn’t even surveyed (Coertzen 2014). There were
other grievances about the city’s sanitation-on-the-cheap strategy: EWS
officials gave the UD recipients inadequate instructions on emptying the
excrement, include digging a pit and planting a papaya tree. EWS’
privatisation of the task of emptying the buckets assisted just 10
percent of users (but payment price was not known).
In 2017, Nosipho Mkhize /et al /(2017, 114) conducted another consumer
satisfaction survey, and found that “the participants generally did not
accept the UD (independent of the condition of the toilet)… More than 95
percent of the participants reported that they do not regard the UD as a
permanent asset and they all aspired to have a flush toilet, which is
associated with being a first-class citizen.” The dilemma, however, is
that water-borne sewage piping is required to link a household to the
mains and then to a sewage treatment plant, and by using incrementalist
sanitation strategies, such piping could not be built until a critical
mass of households reached an income threshold (to afford flushing) and
geographic proximity to become “economic,” and until then, on-site
disposal was the only option. The discriminatory policy, hence, locks in
residential segregation on class and spatial grounds.
Given the ongoing hostility, new EWS strategies were needed. Several
silver-bullet technological fixes emerged, including a 2010 pilot
project which paid low-income residents for collection/recycling of
urine from UDs in view of a coming “peak phosphate” problem faced in
commercial agriculture ($4/month per household). In 2015, some municipal
officials proposed converting the UDs into low-flush systems with
mini-septic tanks. However, in 2016, a more attractive option for the
city emerged within an innovative biopolitical strategy: maintaining the
UDs without any changes, but hiring outsourced workers to empty the
waste (‘sludge’) from UD sites, for trucking to a large sewage treatment
plant in South Durban (Ismail 2018). There, according to designers Nick
Alcock /et al/ (2016, 5), thanks to a $1.3 million Gates Foundation
grant, Durban would attempt “the breeding of Black Soldier Fly Larvae
(BSFL) to process the waste.” One Gates-funded academic study in 2014
“found the use of BSFL could provide a solution to the health problems
associated with poor sanitation and inadequate human waste management in
developing countries… the prepupae produced have a value that could
provide a source of income for communities or local entrepreneurs”
(Banks et al 2014, 14, 20). A /Nature /journal reporter (Wald 2017: 148)
was enthusiastic: “The factories dehydrate the larvae to make an animal
feed or extract a fatty oil, which has a range of uses from cosmetics to
bio-diesel. The leftover organic matter becomes a soil conditioner.”
The main point of the latter project, according to Alcock /et al /(2016,
3), was “to explore opportunities for the management of UD toilet
products and testing various systems for removal and beneficial use
using incentivised contracts with private organisations or individuals
to ensure a safe, efficient, quality service.” The UK-based firm
AgriProtein was the main beneficiary (Bond 2019). But such incentivised
“beneficial use” was easier said than done. The faecal sludge’s
dangerous pathogens – including salmonella – proved resistant to
destruction during heat processing, especially when urine-derived
struvite (magnesium ammonium phosphate) was present due to the
unexpected mixture of solids and liquids. By mid-2019, UKZN researchers
and theWater Research Commission’s Sudhir Pillay admitted to peers at an
international water conference, “A key research need identified for the
continued beneficiation of waste was the microbial risks associated with
struvite production from urine” because “cross contamination of urine
may be occurring through incorrect UD usage with faeces entering the
urine collection receptacle. It is recommended that municipality
re-start their community education programme on the use of UDs” (Vivian
/et al /2019, 148).
But even worse problems were reported at theBill and Melinda Gates
Foundationin December 2019, in the main larvae advocates’ own critical
self-assessment of the Isipingo-based solution. According to Maximillian
Grau and Alcock (2019, 2-6): “the initial process flow for the BSFL
processing plant did not achieve the desired results in terms of
reaching viability” because nearly everything that could go wrong,
apparently did go wrong:
·The UD faecal sludge contained more solid waste (detritus) and other
inorganics such as rubble and sand than expected (up to 40 percent).
Separating the organic content from the detritus was undertaken by hand,
was labour intensive and substantially increased health and safety risks
·The use of an unsophisticated air-conditioner and basic humidifier in
the nursery were not sufficient to maintain a stable climate to achieve
acceptable growth in the nursery
·The low temperatures and humidity levels in the growout sheds in winter
and at night (below 20 degrees Celsius and 60 percent humidity) without
any climate control system prevented satisfactory growth of larvae and
bioconversion of the substrate (sludge mix)
·The wet separation system was not effective as almost all of the
residue and some larvae settled in the agitation bin and thus did not
reach the screening system
·Theoil press which was designed to crush the larvae to make oil was not
effective
·The rotary kiln did operate for several months but ultimately failed
due mainly to the moisture content of the residue being too high on
entry to the kiln
On the positive side, the neoliberal loo was, at least, subject to
continual adjustments and to partial auto-critiques after its repeated
failures. But such research – in contrast to the funding of
standardwater systems – only meant that the struggle by neoliberal
municipal officials would continue to be waged against Durban’s
rebellious black bodies.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] <#_ftnref1>. There is a substantial difference between the UD device
chosen in Durban (without water and with maintenance/cleaning
responsibility completely devolved to the household) and UN Habitat’s
recommended low-cost sanitation system. The latter has various
advantages over the UD system, and has witnessed more than a million
installations in India: “The twin-pit system uses 1.5-2 litres of water
per use in a flush toilet that is connected to two pits that allows
recharging of the soil and composting, and a close-loop public toilet
system attached to a bio-gas digester” (Reddy 2007).
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