Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Nov - Dec Vol. 9 No.6 | Page 33

Sanitation / Wastewater

Modern Western People tend to suffer from a
psychological disease called fecophobia, which is an
irrational fear of faeces. They are a normal part of life
and there is no disease in them that the user did not
have from before, so, if the person is healthy, there
is no health risk in his or her excrement, only an
unpleasant smell to be controlled and nutrients to be
taken advantage of. If the user is sick, their pathogens
get destroyed in the UDDT, as long as it is being
managed properly.
There can be a health risk if, in a multi-family system,
some of the users are sick and they are not using
their UDDTs properly, such that some of their faeces
get mixed into the urine, but this can be controlled
Image credit: “Fulton Officials Discuss Improvements to Wastewater Treatment Plant,”
by storing the urine for a number of months or
KOMUnews © 2014, used under an Attribution 2.0 Generic license:
distributing it below the surface of the soil, where
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
no one will have contact with it. The greatest health
risk occurs when
test, the equivalent of 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools
we do not think
of wastewater were treated, with final sludge reductions of
rationally about this
up to 90 percent,” Gizmag reported.
and do the irrational
Invented by researchers at CSIRO, Australia’s science
act of throwing it all
agency, the technology was successfully deployed in a
in the river, where
commercial mine for the first time this year.
others can have
How it works: Researchers alter the concentration
contact immediately.
of magnesium and aluminum in the wastewater, so
UDDTs are literally a matter of loving and trusting
that the pH of the water rises, according to Gizmag.
Mother Earth, in which we respectfully give back that
Chemically altering the wastewater spurs the formation
which we no longer need, to let her deal with it. If we
of hydrotalicites. As these crystals take shape, they trap
turn back the clock on faeces, we find delicious food on
contaminants inside themselves.
the table. If we turn back the clock again (twice in the
case of meat), we find beautiful plants growing in the
sunlight. One more click and we see rich soil, so what is
to keep them from becoming soil again, if we turn the dial
forward again? Faeces happen and we can deal with them.
(More info at inodoroseco.blogspot.com. If you want to
see more detail here, please write to the editor.)

Invention Gets Wastewater to
Wash Itself
By Sara Jerome
A new invention known as a Virtual Curtain tries to take
some of the effort out of treating wastewater by enlisting
contaminants as cleaning agents.
“Using wastewater to clean itself is the premise of new
Australian technology that relies on the formation of
compounds called hydrotalicites, and which results in less
sludge than traditional water treatment with lime. In one

“The resulting mixture can be easily centrifuged to
separate out the sludge, which there is less of due to its
higher concentration and smaller volume of water mixed
in. The now-concentrated sludge can be theoretically
‘mined’ again to recover some of the metals and minerals
from the mixture. The water can be more efficiently
purified further, if needed, and reused by the facility,”
Gizmag reported.

Making use of contaminants already present in wastewater
is a cost-saver, according to TCE Today, a trade
publication for chemical engineers.
“We have avoided the need for expensive infrastructure
and complicated chemistry to treat the waste,” CSIRO
scientist Grant Douglas said in the piece.
The technology is sold by the Australian company Virtual
Curtain Limited, Business Insider Australia rep