The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, intends to submit to ISO an International Workshop Agreement Proposal on the subject of community based resource oriented sanitation treatment systems, with the following scope statement:
The goal of this International Workshop Agreement is to provide an efficient starting point for international standardization on a system to safely process 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.
Earlier this year, ISO published an IWA on sustainable non-sewered systems, which guides standards development for "next-generation toilets." Life without clean toilet systems can have major consequences, especially in underprivileged nations. According to World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, an estimated 2.5 billion people have no access to safe, clean toilets. Poor sanitation contributes to about 700,000 child deaths from diarrhea each year. Efforts to improve this outcome include a system that will safely process human waste and recover valuable resources such as water, energy, and/or nutrients through economically sustainable technologies in an off-grid and non-sewered environment. [See ANSI's work and progress toward this goal in a September news item].
Progress to reinvent the toilet, as well as efforts to promote an international performance standard for a reinvented toilet, are underway in ISO Project Committee (PC) 305—Sustainable non-sewered sanitation systems. As the new IWA proposal states, the next critical step to reduce the problem will be to reinvent sewage treatment through the deployment of a "stand-alone, industrial scale, community based resource oriented sanitation treatment system."
The proposal explains that while some national standards and other guidelines have been developed that apply to certain aspects of the community based resource oriented sanitation treatment system, or to separate but related technology, no international standard has been found to contain the commonly accepted criteria by which to measure the performance of the community based resource oriented sanitation treatment systems in total.
ANSI proposes to hold up to three (3) two-day meetings between June 2017 and January 2018, at a location in either Singapore or Europe (exact date and venue to be confirmed).
The expected date of publication of the IWA is March 2018.
Stakeholders interested in reading the proposal can contact the ANSI ISO Team ([email protected]). All comments should also be sent to [email protected] by Wednesday, November 30, 2016.