28
HEALTH AND SANITATION
Dear Bill Gates:
We still need sewers
and sewage works
Do we really need to decentralise sanitation and process
our wastes at home? What standards are appropriate for
new infrastructure in poor communities?
By Mike Muller
Towards the end of last year, there was excitement
about Bill Gates’s waterless toilet challenge. Here at
home, the Water Research Commission was going
on about its one-litre toilets, the Human Rights
Commission was deep into Vaal River pollution, and
army engineers were telling us that it would take a
year to fix Emfuleni’s offending sewage works.
Mike Muller
Mike Muller is a
professional civil engineer
and a visiting professor
at the Wits School of
Governance. Now out of
government, he raises
issues that his former
colleagues cannot.
Meanwhile, I was getting a different perspective from
Arif Hasan, a Pakistani architect and planner. Hasan is
(in)famous for producing and implementing a workable
solution for the water and sanitation challenges of the
huge Orangi informal settlement in Karachi. To do that,
he told me, he first had to chase away all the government
officials and their engineers and technicians who, for a
decade, had failed to provide neither water nor sanitation.
Their solutions were just too expensive for the community,
he explained. They wanted to build expensive water
and wastewater treatment plants, and pipe and sewer
networks to international standards. But there was
no money to pay for them. So, as a consultant to the
Orangi Pilot Project in the 1980s, Hasan worked with the
community to develop low-cost groundwater supplies
and build open drains and shallow small-diameter
sewers that discharged untreated wastewater into nearby
watercourses. The technicians were horrified. But, as
Hasan points out, the system did what it was supposed
to do: It allowed people to install waterborne sanitation
(which is what they wanted) and to reduce the pollution in
their neighbourhoods. He immediately acknowledges that
there were problems. Initially, the fish (and the fishermen)
in the nearby estuary were not happy at all. But over time,
the community (and the Karachi municipality) has built a
number of decentralised wastewater treatment plants that
are improving the quality of the water in the estuary, while
open drains are being covered, further improving hygiene.
January 2019 Volume 25 I Number 1
Hasan’s point is that standards cannot be absolute;
what matters is to find ways to achieve the goals that
the communities concerned want to achieve. In a huge,
congested, and relatively poor city like Karachi, a reliable
water supply and wastewater disposal was high on the
list. The initial solutions were not ideal, but they were an
improvement on the original situation and were within
the means of the community. Over time, government has
joined in, the systems have been upgraded, and their
external impact is being brought under control.
The Orangi experience offers South Africans some
important lessons as we confront our present inability
to provide the majority of our citizens with services
that work properly. Attitudes to sanitation are typical.
We should not encourage people with promises of
household toilets that will magically turn human waste
into harmless by-products and do away with the need
for pipes to remove wastewater. It may be technically
possible, but the cost and the organisation required will
present huge barriers.
Pipelines are an efficient way to move large volumes
of goods. And sewers and central wastewater plants
already effectively transport and treat urban wastewaters
in large, densely populated urban areas and can reclaim
pure water and useful waste products. But first, the
wastewater must be collected and removed from houses
and communities. Orangi has shown that starting simple
may not produce perfect results, but working with
communities can lead to better long-term solutions.
It’s a tough message for an engineer to take from an
architect, but Hasan’s 30 years of results made me think
twice and to question attempts by organisations like the
Gates Foundation to find technical fixes for what are in
the end social challenges. PA
www.plumbingafrica.co.za