Sanitation for vulnerable populations in challenging environments: Design Stories in Cambodia + Peru

An estimated 2.5 billion people or 35% of the world’s population, lacks access to improved sanitation (WHO 2012). Many of these people live in conditions where traditional pit latrines do not work: floating, floodplain, clay, mangrove muds, beach sand, and seasonally high groundwater environments. Simple, affordable and ecologically sustainable sanitation in challenging environments is needed with ever more urgency, to address the intertwined issues of diarrheal disease, socio-economics, food security, biodiversity, environmental justice and social equity.

Taber Hand, with Wetlands Work! will be sharing his stories of developing creative wastewater treatment technologies in Cambodia and Myanmar, including the HandyPod technology and its use in the Tonle Sap Lake and other UW World Heritage and Biosphere Reserve sites.  Leann Andrews will be discussing the research of InterACTION Labs on aquatic vegetation and water cleaning in a floating slum in Iquitos, Peru.

Are there any ‘little green doors’ for a sustainable future here or at other global hotspots with growing populations? Reference is made to WW!’s unique HandyPod wastewater technology and its use at Tonle Sap and other UN World Heritage and Biosphere Reserve sites where biodiversity and biological production (food) coincides with human populations.

Wetlands Work! is a social enterprise business in Cambodia that began over 10 years ago. We have developed the only appropriate wastewater treatment technology for people living in conditions where traditional pit latrines do not work: floating, floodplain and seasonally high groundwater environments, clay, mangrove muds and beach sand. Simple, affordable sanitation in challenging environments is needed, with ever more urgency, for vulnerable populations such as environmental migrants moving into fragile, productive habitats that are frequently inundated with water and often legally without private ownership. The demographic trends for East Asian urban areas cited by the World Bank (2015) are compelling and alarming; yet no planners talk about the basic sanitation that is required. Our HandyPod system is a solution. We are now implementing creative sanitation marketing strategies in Cambodian and Myanmar floating and floodplain communities, with project interests in Assam and Benin.