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How about a Cradle2Cradle certification for toilets?

You may or may not have heard of the Cradle to Cradle® design concept – an approach to environmental engineering where materials flows are analysed and optimized to enhance the quality of products for the user so that they are more practical for the user, healthier for everyone affected by the product, and beneficial for the economy and the environment.

Quality enhancement is achieved by focusing on three innovation principles:

1. Everything is designed to be a nutrient for something else (waste = food)
2. Use (of) renewable energy produced from current solar income
3. Support diversity including conceptual, cultural and biodiversity.

A Cradle to Cradle trade fair, held in 2008 in Frankfurt, Germany, already showed C2C products and concepts – mainly from US, Dutch and Austrian manufacturers. This new design concept may just be one side of the medal – the other one being that William McDonough and Michael Braungart, the two inventors behind Cradle to Cradle, actually took this a step further and created a certification: the Cradle to Cradle^® Certification.

Now, my question to you, dear readers, is: what do you think – would it make sense to obtain such a C2C certification for one of the existing or a future sanitation (toilet) system?

My assumption as someone who has been active in the field of sustainable sanitation is that most activists in this sector are scientists, who have in the past missed to really market their approaches. It’s because they are mainly scientists and only sometimes business people, where the creation of a problem-to-be-analyzed is more attractive than a marketable solution. This may of course be only one out of many other reasons why sanitation as such has been so neglected as an important issue for every human on this planet (don’t get me started on the public toilets situation in most countries…). 

I am a great fan of the “Reinventing the Toilet“-approach, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as I believe that real acceptance of reuse-orientated sanitation systems in the developing world will only be possible when the rest of the developed world also starts using a reinvented type of toilets.

Also, a good product may also be made of high quality materials (which could then be recycled, thus kept in a technical loop) and I can also imagine a different type of ownership for the 21st century – where products aren’t “owned” by their users, but instead leased for a period of 15-20 years. This would enable a much more natural recycling where older products would just be given back to the manufacturer.

So the question really is: would such a C2C certification be a catalyst within the redesign process, and would it be an ultimate marketing tool that would also help changing the general perception of toilets (as a taboo that no one likes to talk about)?

What do you think?

Photo credit: UDDTs in a school in Ukunda, Kenya, by Engineers without borders. Taken from the (CC)-licensed Sustainable Sanitation photo collection on Flickr. 

Harnessing the wisdom of crowds: Open discussion forum helps to answer many sanitation related questions

The following is a guest post by GIZ ecosan team leader, Dr. Elisabeth von Münch:

Harnessing the wisdom of crowds: Open discussion forum helps to answer many sanitation related questions

The idea for this open discussion forum on sanitation came from our experience that when you want to buy a new car or have a question about your baby’s teeth: where do you get advice from? You put your question into a search engine like Google and you end up reading other people’s postings on a discussion forum. Usually, those questions and answers prove to be very helpful.

The same mechanism can hold true for a discussion forum on sanitation issues. This is why the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA) secretariat developed a new discussion forum which was launched in July 2011. The forum is open – as opposed to some existing closed fora which require a login even just for reading. Today, the SuSanA forum already has 930 registered users, 40 topics, nearly 1000 views for the most popular topics, and some topics have attracted up to 20 replies.

All postings are readable by everyone and searchable by search engines like Google and Yahoo. A broad range of topics are covered such as sanitation systems and technologies, health and hygiene, CLTS, school sanitation, sanitation systems for special conditions, menstrual hygiene management, SuSanA working groups and announcements and many more.

All registered users can contribute to the forum by creating new discussion topics or by responding to the posts of others. The option to create a user profile, including a passport-style photo, is available. The user can also attach additional documents and photos to his or her posts.

For people who like to receive postings via e-mail, it is also possible to subscribe to a daily e-mail alert service of new posts simply by leaving your e-mail address here. Alternatively or in addition, one can subscribe to specific categories or topics after logging in and thereby follow specific discussions.

Here are four examples of very active discussion threads so far:
• Faecal sludge management
• Mobile sanitation systems like peepoo bags in Kenya or a new urine diversion toilet pot in Bangladesh
• Menstrual Hygiene Management, including the Ruby Cup business idea in Kenya
• Progress of SuSanA working groups

To view the discussion forum or to obtain your own login for writing on the forum, please click here: www.forum.susana.org

For further information or questions please contact the SuSanA secretariat.

new discussion forum on sustainable sanitation

The Sustainable Sanitation Alliance, of which this blog on sanitation is a member, recently came up with a new forum on their server to drive discussions and open exchange on (sustainable) sanitation and hygiene to an open platform.

All registered users of the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (anyone can become a member!) may contribute to the forum, and the reason for posting this here is to focus your attention on this forum. Contrary to a lot of other sites on the internet that are either hidden or locked up from the public, the forum is free and open. Also, there’s no ultimate solution in knowledge management. Discussions take place on Facebook walls, in LinkedIn or Facebook groups, within old-fashioned mailing lists and even at the comment section on YouTube section. You can’t control this. But you can offer attractive alternatives – like this new forum. Yay!

So if you haven’t already, please join this new forum and contribute some content. The internet is all about sharing knowledge – think of The Khan Academy, The Open Source Ecology group or even the Appropedia wiki. And while I believe in distributed and accessible knowledge, I – at the same time – also prefer to have one single resource for collected knowledge on one specific topic (like sustainable sanitation and appropriate hygiene management). This forum is my preferred choice for the discussion part.