The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the U.S. member body of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), encourages stakeholders to participate in the newly formed ISO Project Committee (PC) 318, Community-scale resource-oriented sanitation treatment systems, which currently has 14 participating member countries and 12 observing member countries. ISO PC 318 is focused on the development of a new ISO standard for faecal sludge treatment systems, to ensure they meet general performance, safety aspects, and sustainability requirements.
Global participants that join the committee will work towards developing an international standard to support faecal sludge treatment units that service approximately 1,000 to 100,000 people. Ultimately, professional collaboration will support efforts to reverse inadequate sanitation, considered a worldwide challenge.
ANSI's collaborative efforts stem from an overarching goal to reverse underdeveloped global sanitation, a rampant issue for a large portion of the world's population. If not addressed soon, poor sanitation will continue to have dire consequences on world poorest communities. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated two billion people use latrines that aren't safely emptied and treated, and one billion people are forced to defecate in the open. Without access to safe sewage treatment, pathogens from human waste make their way into the soil and water systems, contaminating food and water, and endangering human life.
Current sludge management approaches are insufficient and often unsafe, and have a direct and devastating impact on human health and safety, especially when sludge is unsafely disposed from on-site systems. The new committee will focus on reinventing sludge treatment through the deployment of a standalone, industrial-scale, community-scaled resource-oriented sanitation treatment system. In order to realize the full impact of these technologies and deploy them safely at a larger scale, stakeholders are needed to develop relevant safety and performance guidelines for commercial systems.
ISO/PC 318 will focus on is faecal sludge treatment through the development of sanitation treatment units.
In related efforts to improve sanitationcrucial to good healthANSI, twinned with ASN (the National Body of Senegal) serve as Secretariat to ISO PC 305, (formed in 2016), which aims to reinvent the toilet and promote an international performance standard on a consumer- level house-hold scale. Through its work in PC 305, ANSI, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has taken the initiative to develop international standards on Sustainable non-sewered sanitation systems. Part of the solution, which is currently underway in ISO/PC 305, is to develop an international performance standard for consumer-level household scale toilets and integrated treatment systems.
Standardization work would impact multiple stakeholder categories ranging from industry and commerce to governmentfor the universal goal of improved public sanitation. There are three ISO committees that are currently involved in similar areas of standards development, including ISO Technical Committee (TC) 224, Service activities relating to drinking water systems and wastewater systems; ISO TC 275, Sludge recovery, recycling, treatment and disposal; and ISO TC 282, Water reuse. The new PC is out of scope for the other committees.
ANSI - as the secretariat to ISO PC 318 - is calling on global participants to join ISO PC 318, which will meet for the first time on July 16-19, 2018, in Dakar, Senegal. All interested stakeholders can contact their national standards body or Sally Seitz, PC 318 secretary, ANSI, at [email protected].
About ANSI
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is a private non-profit organization whose mission is to enhance U.S. global competitiveness and the American quality of life by promoting, facilitating, and safeguarding the integrity of the voluntary standardization and conformity assessment system. Its membership is comprised of businesses, professional societies and trade associations, standards developers, government agencies, and consumer and labor organizations. The Institute represents and serves the diverse interests of more than 270,000 companies and organizations and 30 million professionals worldwide. ANSI is the official U.S. representative to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and, via the U.S. National Committee, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). For more information, visit www.ansi.org.
About ISO
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies from more than 160 countries. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, ISO is a non-governmental organization whose mission is to promote the development of standardization and related activities in the world with a view to facilitating the international exchange of goods and services, and to developing cooperation in the spheres of intellectual, scientific, technological, and economic activity.
ISO's work results in international agreements which are published as international standards and other types of ISO documents. ISO standards are developed by groups of experts, within technical committees (TCs), subcommittees (SCs), and project committees (PCs). Each committee, which focuses on a different subject, is made up of representatives of industry, NGOs, governments, and other stakeholders, who are put forward by ISO's members.