Container-based sanitation (CBS) is increasingly used to provide safely managed sanitation in low-income urban settlements. However, questions remain around the viability of scaling up the technology, partly because it relies on regular emptying and servicing of containers by a CBS provider. This paper investigates mechanisms by which this process can be achieved efficiently. Three separate collection strategies are evaluated for their routing efficiencies as CBS goes to scale. An open-source route optimisation solver determines the constituent driving and walking distances necessary for each strategy and has been applied in areas of Cape Town, Cap-Haïtien, Lima and Nairobi. The results indicate that with fewer users (e.g. 50) transfer station models offer the shortest driving routes. However, these do require users to carry their containers (e.g. up to 170 m when stations are 100 m apart). As the number of users increases (e.g. to 5,000), visiting individual houses from a neighbourhood depot offers increasingly efficient driving distances. Overall, however, the results suggest that economies in collection distances for scaled CBS will be largely conditional on greater vehicle capacity (rather than any particular provision strategy). This highlights the importance of road access throughout low-income urban settlements in providing a viable CBS service at scale.
Container-based sanitation (CBS) is an increasingly recognised form of off-grid sanitation provision appropriate for impoverished urban environments. To ensure a safely managed and sustainable service, a managing organisation must implement a service chain that performs robustly and cost-effectively, even with an expanding customer base. These ‘CBS operators’ adopt varying approaches to achieve this objective. Following research including interviews with representatives from six current CBS operators, this paper presents a generalised diagrammatic model of a CBS service chain and discusses the three broad thematic challenges currently faced by these organisations. Supplying cover material is a universal problem with hidden challenges when taking advantage of freely available resources. There is no universally applicable approach for the efficient collection of faecal waste despite the high labour costs of waste collection. The best strategy depends on the CBS operator's overall expansion strategy and the location of fixed features within the served community. Although CBS is technically well-suited to being turned into new products within the circular economy, in practice, this requires a diverse range of skills from CBS operators and is hampered by slow growth in other organic waste recovery services and unhelpful regulation.
No abstract
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.