An amazing 130 of the 169 UN SDG targets have synergies with sanitation. Find out the details in this study or go to our new interactive website.

Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) are indisputable pillars of global public health. Well-implemented interventions that result in improved access to WASH by individuals and communities are necessary for the control, elimination and eradication of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) – a group of diseases prioritized by WHO given their propensity to cause suffering, deepen poverty and worsen social inequality. Progress against certain NTDs can therefore serve as a proxy for equity and effective targeting of WASH programmes.

The publication "A Sanitation Journey - Principles, Approaches and Tools for Urban Sanitation" provides an orientation to the sector’s current status and future directions, aimed at both sanitation professionals and those outside the sector. The publication describes the historical background of how urban sanitation in the Global South has developed and how the international discourse about strategies to improve urban sanitation have evolved over the past decades.

The aim of this book is to provide a basis for standardised methods for the analysis of faecal sludge from onsite sanitation technologies, for Improved communication between sanitation practitioners, and for greater confidence in the generated data.

https://www.eawag.ch/index.php?id=100896&L=1&no_cache=1

The aim of this document is to provide an overview of the possibilities for resource recovery from sanitation and provide guidance on treatment processes to achieve safe products for reuse. The focus of this document is on resource recovery from the organic wastes managed in sanitation systems.

There are significant resources within excreta and wastewater fractions that can be recovered and turned into useful products. For example, the average person excretes 4.5 kg of nitrogen, 0.5 kg of phosphorus and 1.2 kg of potassium every year. These elements and other micronutrients found in excreta are critical for the fertilising and restoration of agricultural soils.

https://www.slu.se/en/ew-news/2021/1/guide-to-sanitation-resource-recovery-products--technologies-a-supplement-to-the-compendium-of-sanitation-systems-and-technologies/

In order to ensure the functionality and sustainability of school sanitation facilities, proper use and maintenance is a crucial component of successful WASH implementation. This has inspired the development of the O&M – Calculate the cost mobile application, which is a product of the synergy between the Regional Fit for School Programme and Sector Programme for Sustainable Sanitation. This mobile application is geared toward helping schools calculate annual costs for WinS operation and maintenance in compliance with global recommendations on drinking water, sanitation, personal hygiene, and environmental/surface hygiene.

This report presents the state of sanitation in the world today to increase awareness of the progress made towards achieving the SDG targets for sanitation, and the challenges that remain. It calls on Member States, the United Nations system and partners to rise to these challenges within the context of the SDG 6 Global Acceleration Framework.

By presenting best practices, case studies, successes and challenges, this report seeks to inspire Member States and all stakeholders to learn from each other and work together towards achieving universal access to safe sanitation by 2030.

Project WISE will bring improved water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure; behavior change programs for kids and adults; and strengthened menstrual health services for girls aged 10 and above. Our goal is to demonstrate a scalable, durable, and cost-efficient WASH-in-Schools (WINS) model that can be replicated beyond the initial two target cities and countries.

Sustainable Development Goal 6 for water and sanitation calls for the realization of safely managed services (SMSS) for everyone by 2030. While there has been significant research and implementation to improve the sanitation service chain in urban settings, little guidance is available on how to achieve and sustain SMSS in rural contexts. In 2019, WSSCC commissioned this study to examine to what extent Global Sanitation Fund (GSF)-supported programmes enabled SMSS in rural areas with collective behaviour change approaches like CLTS, identify challenges, good practices, and learning needs, and generate a set of recommendations for rural sanitation programmes.

Container-Based Sanitation (CBS) is a sanitation service which provides toilets with sealable, removable containers that are collected on a regular basis to safely dispose of or reuse fecal sludge. The CBS Alliance has spent the last several years compiling resources and lessons learned to create this guide to implementation. CBS has the potential to be an essential addition to the suite of sanitation options if done correctly. The CBS Implementation Guide is meant to breakdown in detail preferred implementation strategies and the reasoning for using them.

Climate change represents one of the world’s most pressing and urgent challenges. Sanitation is a significant contributor, producing roughly 2–6% of global man-made methane. As urban populations grow, the use of rudimentary sanitation systems such as pit latrines, septic tanks, and waste settling ponds will increase sanitation-related emissions. These impacts highlight the urgent need for climate positive approaches to the sanitation crisis such as container-based systems. Moreover, the tool provides an innovative opportunity to support funders, planners, companies, implementers and policy makers to shift towards more climate-positive solutions and support the realisation of global climate change targets.

New analysis provides the missing piece of the puzzle, clearly showing that CBS is less costly than other forms of improved sanitation.

The International Water Association (IWA) and the Toilet Board Coalition (TBC) have developed this white paper as a call to action for sanitation and water operators to embrace opportunities for their products and services to feed into a new digital public health ecosystem.

The first Compendium produced by Eawag (Department Sandec) and WSSCC in 2008 provides knowledge on a wide range of sanitation technologies without bias and/or agenda, and helped to increase the recognition that a fully functioning sanitation ‘chain’ must link toilets to a treatment facility via an operational collection and transportation system. It also presented resource recovery and reuse options as a necessary objective for the sustainable management of excreta.

You can find a more updated version here.

Biochar is increasingly being applied as a soil amendment in agriculture. Biochar is typically produced from plant biomass and contains relatively low amounts of plant nutrients, thus providing limited fertilizer value. Human excreta contains plant nutrients that could be recycled to create sustainable agricultural nutrient cycles. This study investigated the potential of biochar derived from a dry toilet substrate as soil amendment.

Municipal solid waste management is one of the major environmental challenges of urbanisation. Together with local partners, Sandec’s, the Department of Sanitation, Water and Solid Waste for Development, research focuses on developing innovative concepts and appropriate solid waste management solutions with a strong emphasis on recycling approaches.

The current global pandemic COVID-19 and its impact on the world’s economies is irrefutable proof that solving water and sanitation challenges goes beyond the public health imperative. More now than ever, finance ministers can look for opportunities to collaborate with their peers in other ministries – and use the examples and techniques suggested in this handbook – to develop financial policies that contribute to lasting solutions. This handbook provides a framework for thinking about actions that can be taken to address the deep-seated challenges of the sector, once such leadership is mobilized.

A review of new enterprise models shaping the development of a transformational sanitation economy by Ernst & Young and the Toilet Board Coalition.

Excellent report with lots practical business models which drive the future of sanitation and some of the companies driving it.

This paper by Agenda for Change describes the concepts and framework that Members use for analysing systems and expanding on how they use these tools in specific contexts to identify potential entry points to influence and strengthen systems and provides practical examples.

The study “Evaluating the Potential for Container-Based Sanitation” looks at container-based sanitation (CBS), an emerging sanitation approach. The objective of this study is to document and assess existing CBS approaches, with a particular focus on evaluating their safety, reliability, affordability, and financial viability.