Why Ecological Sanitation?

a. It utilizes urine-diverting, dehydration toilets (ecosan) as a means to improve management of human waste in waterless communities such as upland areas and use this in order to improve nutrition among poor populations. Due to climate change, some area in the Philippines have less and less water and flush-pour toilets are no longer an effective way to manage human waste so people do open defecation thereby spreading diseases and helminths. The Philippines is number 3 in Asia with an epidemic in helminths infestation especially among children;

b. Ecosan toilets is not new and so many are advocating its use, but the problem is that these proponents are focused on using materials purchased from the cities/towns (eg. cement, rebars)  and are thus expensive and inaccessible by the poor who needs it most. Our approach is to custom-design ecosan toilets using locally-available materials and there is no need to purchase from the town anymore;

c.  Most ecosan proponents have not considered how to re-use human waste in agriculture and small-scale gardening for food, thus mountains of human waste are left unprocessed and poses a danger to the community and environment. In our case, we have devised a system of organic fertilizer production using local micro-organisms (eg. lactic acid bacteria) to decompose waste and render it safe for re-use as fertilizer and producing what we call “terra-preta biochar sanitation (tpb-s) fertilizer”.   Terra Preta is the anthropogenic black soil that was produced by ancient cultures through the conversion of bio-waste and fecal matter into long-term fertile soils and the amazing thing is that terra-preta soils do not need fertilizer anymore. Our early experiments show a lot of promise in the production of terra preta fertilizer and we will be producing terra-preta mix taking into consideration carbon-nitrogen ratio and organic matter content.

d. . While others are implementing dry toilet projects for the poor as dole-outs which the poor sometimes resent, we are doing ours on a micro-financing scheme and integrating it into the larger micro-finance initiative and local livelihood development of poor households. Thus when a beneficiary take a loan to support livelihood projects, he can also take a loan for a dry toilet.