Clearing my thoughts on non-sewered sanitation and treatment options

The peer-reviewed research study "Integrating recent scientific advances to enhance non-sewered sanitation in urban areas" by Linda Strande , published in May 2024 in #Nature_Water, has left me with several important impressions, which I am presenting here.

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I have often found myself stuck in the middle of reviewing designs for localized non-sewered wastewater management, despite having a graduate degree in wastewater specialization, which is further exaggerated by the use of frequently changing sanitation frontiers devised terms like non-sewered sanitation, faecal sludge management, DEWATS, safely managed sanitation, city-wide inclusive sanitation, eco-san and many others. But the real key is to understand the nature of waste, how it breaks down, and how to manage and properly dispose of it in the environment.

This peer-reviewed paper by Linda Strande and the acknowledged colleagues, which was just published in Nature Water Journal, does a fantastic job of explaining the concept of "debunking common misconceptions" and presents numerous instances from around the globe in understanding the science behind the treatment of stored wastewater. I have attached a collage and jotted down the key learnings that helped me clear my doubts.

-         ‘the majority of the engineering literature embarks knowledge on sewer based solutions, because of which practitioners in low and middle-income countries for designing non-sewered systems face the obstacles”

-         Widely varying characteristics of stored wastewater, further impacted by varying storage durations,  dietary habits, challenges in normalizing data and statistical relationships, inherent variability, unclear stabilization, and decomposition kinetics, slower hydrolysis than in sewer-based wastewater,  additional pre-treatment due to extracellular polymeric substances causing high suspended particles, turbidity and clogging,  introduction of coagulants/flocculants, and manual mechanical dewatering for smaller footprint of treatment systems.

Thanks to the author Linda Strande, the acknowledged team and the publisher for sharing the knowledge for the good.

I'm now starting to have new questions: aren't we practicing something whose science and theories still require much study and development? Excellent for study, but how will it be put into practice? How can you persuade practitioners who object to implementing something they are unsure of?