Why Cities Are Starting to Shun Sewers

solarpunk-gnome:

On the outskirts of Bangalore, India’s tech capital,
an office doubles as a museum of the toilet. An exhibit in one room
traces the history of sanitation, from ancient Mesopotamian sewers to
Europe’s first flush toilets and the modern sewer systems built to
process the waste they spurt out. Then, another exhibit turns to the
global sanitation crisis — including a sculpture of naked babies
representing the half-million children under 5 who die from diarrhea
annually — and technologies to tackle it.

CDD Society, the
nonprofit housing the display, wants Indians to think outside the sewer.
It has built India’s first citywide fecal sludge treatment plant, which
turns human excreta into compost with no electricity and no connection
to an underground sewer. Built in 2015 at a capital cost of $94,000 (Rs.
6 million), it serves a municipality of 30,000 on the outskirts of
Bangalore. But it is also increasingly emerging as a model for other
Indian cities — which dump 70 percent of urban sewage
untreated into the environment. More than a dozen cities, including
three so far in 2018, have commissioned similar projects from CDD.

[More at the link]

Why Cities Are Starting to Shun Sewers