By Catarina Mavila, Prof Wilbard Kombe, Emmanuel Osuteye, Nadine Coetzee, Angèle Koue and Prof Julian Walker
Reflections from visits to 2 faecal sludge treatment plants in Tamil Nadu with TNUSSP
For those of us who are lucky enough, sewage is a hidden system, once you flush the toilet it disappears, out of sight out of mind. But these standard and accepted technological models of managing sewage are often most suited to urban neighbourhoods that are gridded, planned, serviced and topographically flat. By default these words can often be used to describe the most affluent areas of any city over the world. These parts of our cities do not require a shift from the status quo – they live the urban ideal.
By comparison the left-over urban areas often provide homes for the urban poor, as people scramble to be part of the economic opportunities on offer. The urban poor take to the slopes, the outskirts, the flood plains and the dunes. Here solutions designed around grid and gravity are often absent. Open defecation becomes a default, along with the coping mechanisms to manage personal safety, local taboos and by laws that govern going to the loo. In these zones shared and individual sanitation facilities are often limited to storing effluent in tanks until capacity is reached and then paying a service provider to empty, clean and dump the waste from the tanks. But where and how? In cases where no system exists, untreated waste ends up reburied on site, in agricultural lands, contaminating water sources, or in storm water drains.
One solution to this problem, rather than trying to immediately connect unserved urban poor communities to the sewage grid (which tends to be too expensive and disruptive to be a feasible solution in practice) is to improve on-site storage in septic tanks and develop systems for faecal sludge to be transported to facilities where it can be treated, to produce outputs such as water that can be used for irrigation, bio-gas and fertilizers. This approach is known as is Faecal Sludge Management, (FSM) and offers a cheaper and more feasible approach to extending sanitation at scale.
However FSM as a solution tends to face a lot of resistance, based on the idea that it is messy, smelly and dirty. It is doubtful whether one would want to live or work around FSM?
So, to return to our question, isn’t faecal sludge management (FSM) really messy? And who in their right minds would agree to or encourage the construction of a plant in their neighbourhood?
If there was ever a clear case for NIMBY-ism – the management of poo in your backyard would seem to be the one! However, the OVERDUE team visit to some FSM sites, that have been set up as part of the Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Programme (TNUSSP) in Coimbatore and Mannagudi, seems to suggest something different.
First of all, people who are suspicious of FSM based on the mess, smell and dirt should remember that the real mess is created when FSM is not systematised. In the cities that we visited in Tamil Nadu we were told that prior to the project, given the lack of access to sewerage or FSM treatment facilities, faecal sludge from household and community toilets was emptied directly into canals and other waterways, or spread onto fields without being treated, and unmanaged septic tanks overflowed or seeped into the earth and water table. Which all seems quite ‘messy’. Do people want to live and work around that, for the decades that it takes to extend the sewage grid to their neighbourhoods?
Isn’t it messy? 1: The smell
On the other hand, the two FSM treatment facilities that we visited, one gravity based Faecal Sludge Treatment Plant (FSTP) in the town of Mannagurdi, and another mechanised FSTP in the Coimbatore suburb of Periyanaickenpalayam (PNP) were surprising in how clean they were, and how little smell there was. On arriving and looking round many of us initially thought the plants weren’t in current use. The plant in Mannagurdi serves a population of 100,000 and receives loads from within a 10km radius of the plant. “So where’s all the shit!?” we wondered, but it turns out the process of separating the wastewater from the sludge leaves surprisingly little residue.
We were offered masks to wear, but it seems this was more an act of sanitation etiquette (“it’s a sludge treatment plant so you’ll want to wear masks?”) because there really wasn’t any significant smell to speak of, and the workers we observed wore very little in terms of PPE.
In our experience, despite serving significant populations and receiving 231 (Mannagudi) and 67 (PNP) truckloads of septic waste on a monthly basis, it is possible to have an enjoyable cup of tea while seated on the edge of one of the faecal sludge drying beds. Although anecdotal, the point is that you can have a FSTP next door and not really notice, in fact most of us would prefer to live alongside an FSTP than any sort of river or green space that serves as a sanitation facility.
Isn’t it messy? 2: The dirt
In fact all the FSTPs visited were neat, and in the case of PNP surrounded by an ornamental park. In Mannargudi the gravel filtration pits that were the last phase of the wastewater treatment, taking nitrates out before the water could be reused in agriculture, were planted with flowering canna lilies that most people would expect to see in an ornamental garden (See image 5).
It was also interesting to see in practice how treated waste could provide additional useful materials, including an organic manure when it was blended and composted with domestic and market food waste. The manure making process became a secondary/subsidiary employment and revenue generation mode for the, mainly female, staff working in this phase of the treatment and processing.
Because of the considerable effort put in place to filter out non-biodegradable materials and dispose of them properly, and frequent rapid testing protocols to prevent the disposal of industrial waste that was high in chemical content, the resulting compost is a slow grow horticultural manure that meets national Indian standards for growing mediums (Fertiliser Control Order, FCO) and can be sold on for use. This product is of course met with some resistance, as is the story of so many elements of sanitation, but the proof is in the pudding and the banana tree plantation at PNP are testament to that.
In terms of resistance, it would be a mistake to focus only on the technology here, as people are and always have been the purposed of sanitation systems – as workers and/or users. The taboos that surround the infrastructure extend to the people that manage it. The mechanisation of the FSTP in PNP (as opposed to gravity based at Mannagudi) meant that some defined skills had to be developed by the team that managed the plant, creating meaningful, safe and sustainable employment opportunities for local sanitation workers. The well structured “flow” of waste from one part of a process to the next (see image 9 below), neat environment, and a regiment approach to trucks lining up and emptying their loads, also provided a dignified outlook to a job, that is often looked down upon and viewed with disgust.
As you may have figured out by now, the land parcels that form home to FSTPs host a holistic set of waste management processes from waste sorting, recycling, faecal sludge management, composting and landscaping to absorb it all. Many of the land parcels in use are polluted or contaminated as former landfill sites or industrial uses. Meaning that FTSP is able to use land pockets unsuitable for housing or recreation. These demonstration waste management parks are changing the perception of waste from something inconvenient to hide to something generative that can support productive processes (growing and land rehabilitation) and livelihoods.
Ok, so FSM isn’t messy but how do we convince others?
A colleague from TNUSSP shared with us that 7 years ago, when the programme was in its infancy the response, to the presented plans to demonstrate FSM in Tamil Nadu, from government officials was “But isn’t FSM really messy?”. What was TNUSSP’s retort? No, we’ll show you!
What we saw on our visits are the fruits of nearly a decade of advocacy work and technical innovation where the primary focus when it comes to FSM was demonstration.
In the case of PNP capital from an international donor organisation provided an opportunity to demonstrate a mechanised FSTP more suitable to areas where large pockets of land are unavailable (uses on average a 10th of the land of a gravitational plant). You won’t hear the word pilot amongst TNUSSP colleagues, because ‘pilots never fail, pilots never scale’, whereas demonstrations are designed to scale from the outset, they are built to operate within existing structures, and they are developed alongside those who will eventually take them on as their own. In both cases a Design Build Operate and Transfer (DBOT) contract set out the terms with local government partners and dictated that after 2 years of demonstration by TNUSSP the facility would be transferred to become a local authority asset. The result being that the uptake can be exponential; as FSM technology, associated policy frameworks and political commitments are absorbed as part of the government sanitation toolkit. The real win here is the implementation of an incremental solution to support those without access to a more formal sewer system while they wait, which may be a while.
Not only did TNUSSP prove that the dirt and smell of an FSTP was in fact nothing to fear, they also demonstrated that by closing the sanitation loop a series of wider impacts can be expected including improved population public health, reduction of environmentally damaging dumping of untreated waste and overall improved living conditions in associated informal and underserved areas.
Faecal sludge management is not only not messy, but it has also proved critical to an overall improvement to the lives of those that live around it and rely on it.