The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will hold the first workshop to develop an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) International Workshop Agreement (IWA) on Community-Scale Resource-Oriented Sanitation Systems on June 28-30, in Durban, South Africa. The IWA will serve as an important step to develop an international standard for non-sewered sanitation systems.
Poor sanitation management poses a threat to the health and safety of large populations and leads to dire outcomes. As an example, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that 2.5 billion people live without access to safe and clean toilets and 1 billion are forced to defecate in the openactions that can ultimately lead to dysentery-like diarrheal diseases and. Adding to the challenge, untreated waste sludge that is unsafely disposed of can lead to environmental pollution and accelerate deadly diseases.[See related coverage here]
The goal of the IWA is to create a community-scale resource-oriented sanitation treatment system to ensure safety aspects of next generation treatment systems, by safely processing human waste, and, possibly household waste, and recover valuable resources such as water, energy, and/or nutrients through economically sustainable technologies in an off-grid and non-sewered environment.
This IWA is also a starting point to achieve a standard that would enhance efforts to widely manufacture, market, and deploy the technology where it is needed most. Partners and grantees of the Foundation consist of stakeholders from around the globe, including developing countries. Expert IWA participants are welcome and do not have to be members of ISO or their respective standardization body. The IWA has an expected publication date of March 2018.
As the U.S. member body to ISO, ANSI would serve as the Secretariat of record, and together with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, provide logistical support. The IWA will be the first of three proposed meetings scheduled between June 2017 and January 2018, with the next meeting scheduled for September 4-8, 2017, in Singapore.
View the agenda and register for the first ISO International Workshop on Community-Scale Resource-Oriented Sanitation Treatment Systems at www.ansi.org/WasteTreatment.
Please email Sally Seitz ([email protected]) with any questions or comments on the IWA.