PIONEERING STANDARD TO END TOILET USE PARADIGM

Around 25% the world’s population lacks access to basic sanitation. This is due to waterborne sanitation’s high costs, as well as growing water availability constraints. ISO 30500 (identically adopted by South Africa as SANS 30500) can assist in fast-tracking the roll-out of off-grid or non-sewered sanitation.

By Kirsten Kelly

Previously, the public sector had been confronted with new sanitation technology but, because there was no national standard, the onus and responsibility were placed on public officials to provide the guidance and position in terms of validating these technologies. It also disadvantaged many good solutions providers from entering the market.

History

“The Water Research Commission (WRC) keeps being inundated with requests for the validation of new sanitation technology in the absence of any standards and testing platforms. This is a challenge, as without demonstration or testing, scale-up and application were at risk,” explains Jay Bhagwan, executive manager: Water Use and Waste Management, WRC.

The Gates Foundation decided to initiate the development of the international standard, ISO 30500, because ISO is an inclusive platform that brings governments, business, civil society together to create innovative solutions

Fortunately, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation decided to initiate the development of the ISO 30500 international standard. This was done with the intention of enhancing efforts to widely manufacture, market and deploy technologies (developed from their ‘Reinvent the Toilet’ challenge) – as well as several other new innovations – where they were needed most.

“A substantial amount of work was done prior to the launch of the standard development processes at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). They had tasked TÜV SÜD – a global leader in product testing and certification – and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to draft a pre-standard that could serve as a basis for an ISO standard,” explains Stefan Marinkovic, technical programme manager, ISO.

ISO has hundreds of technical committees that are dedicated to very specific disciplines. At the time, there was no committee that was best suited to work on the standard proposal. Due to the innovative scope of the standard, a project committee (dubbed PC305) was created, with 36 countries participating and 13 observing.

“ISO/PC305 had impressive representation. It was important that the standard was geared towards the users of the technology. The aim of ISO 30500 is to improve the lives of poor communities who have no access to a water or wastewater network. The Gates Foundation wanted the countries in which the technology would be deployed to participate in drafting the standard and, with their support, ensured two experts per country were represented. This facilitated the efficient formation of the standard, and created a fair representation of all countries, including developing countries, which are often at a disadvantage when it comes to funding their experts’ participation,” adds Marinkovic.

The standard was developed with experts representing industry, government, academia and nongovernmental organisations like the African Water Association and the Toilet Board Coalition. South Africa is one of the first countries in the world to adopt the standard. It played an important role in the development process and was the second country to identically adopt ISO 30500 into a local standard – SANS 30500.

“Dr Konstantina Velkushanova – previously senior research associate: Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Research & Development (WASH R&D) Centre, University of KwaZulu-Natal (now a senior lecturer at IHE, Delft, the Netherlands), and the late Professor Chris Buckley – research professor and head of the WASH R&D Centre – were part of the panel of technical experts, while SABS had representation supported by myself from the WRC, which devised the standard. South Africa hosted a plenary session, as well as a technical tour of some of the piloted technologies,” says Bhagwan.

South Africa, through the WASH R&D Centre, has also been involved in the Engineering Field Testing (EFT) Platform that was funded by the Gates Foundation and designed to test various sanitation technologies arising from the ‘Reinvent the Toilet’ challenge in laboratory and real-world environments.

The purpose of the EFT was to determine the robustness of the tested system, user acceptance and the applicability to the South African environment.

Through this experience, the centre developed guidelines, funded by the WRC, on how to demonstrate and test innovative sanitation systems in realworld environments prior to manufacture and commercialisation. The guidelines are intended for local technology and commercialisation partners (LTCPs) in the sanitation field.

SANS 30500

ISO/SANS 30500 specifies general safety and performance requirements for design and testing, as well as sustainability considerations for non-sewered sanitation systems (NSSS). NSSS are prefabricated integrated treatment units containing a front-end component (such as low-flush, vacuum and urine-diversion dry or flushing toilets, and excludes conventional water-intensive flushing toilets) and a back-end treatment component (ranging from biological to chemical or physical processes, or a combination of these).

It covers aspects and criteria related to safety, functionality, usability, reliability and maintainability, as well as the system’s compatibility with environmental protection goals. The standard excludes guidelines for selection, installation, operation and maintenance procedures, or the management of NSSS, and neither incorporates nor substitutes for manufacturers’ instructions and user manuals.

Bringing the conceptual toilet to reality

“ISO 30500 entails a lot of testing that can be very expensive and stringent. Currently, there is no accredited laboratory in South Africa that has the facilities to perform every test stipulated in the standard. However, there are some laboratories, like the WASH R&D Centre, currently undergoing accreditation for ISO 17025:2017, which is specifically for calibration and testing,” explains Preyan Arumugam-Nanoolal, research assistant and scientist at the WASH R&D Centre.

Arumugam-Nanoolal has also been involved with the development of a voluntary testing protocol for low-flush pedestals that is based on SANS 1733:2011 and international best practice, with a few adaptations or additional tests that could give municipalities and developers the confidence required when selecting low-flush technologies for different scenarios. “The majority of the tests included in this voluntary testing protocol are easy to conduct and useful for establishing the aspects of the performance that these were designed to address. The testing protocol is fit for purpose and should be adopted as a voluntary performance indicator for low-flush pedestal performance.”

Another challenge is setting up a certification system where an independent body will evaluate a toilet and determine whether it has been manufactured to the requirements of the standard.

“For this to happen, there needs to be a critical mass – enough toilets needing to be certified to justify the cost embedded into becoming a third-party certifier of ISO 30500. They are linked to each other – market acceptance is driven by ISO 35000 certified products and ISO 35000 certification will likely only happen once there is a large volume of products on the market,” states Marinkovic.

Conclusion

“Many solutions providers can now enter the market. The standard is also beneficial to manufacturers, as it provides strategic guidance that reduces costs by minimising waste and errors, increasing productivity and facilitating free and fair trade. It gives assurance to manufacturers of NSSS, governments, regulators and end-users that the non-sewered facilities they use are safe, reliable and of good quality,” adds Bhagwan.

“ISO 30500 will be the reference document for the future exchanges between users, prescribers, manufacturers and laboratories to guarantee that the proposed solutions address this urgent world health problematic,” he says.

“It will permit the creation of a new market with a lot of innovative NSSS and will reduce drastically the diseases linked to a lack of sanitation. ISO 30500 is the first step for the development of a local circular economy with the transformation of human wastes into valuable resources.”