Testing decentralised treatment solutions for portable home toilet waste - Kumasi, Ghana

Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) and Unilever have developed Clean Team, a business providing portable home toilets that are attractive and branded. Customers pay for their waste to be collected two to four times per week. Three “off-the-shelf” technologies are being tested to treat this waste and allow Clean Team to scale up to other cities. The three technologies are Sistema Biobolsa, which uses flexible tubes as anaerobic digesters, and aerobic planted gravel filter; Biorock, where an anaerobic pre-treatment tank is followed by an aerobic tank containing synthetic filtration media, pretreated with enzymes that stimulate the growth of aerobic bacteria and ventilation executed by natural draft; and Biofil, which will receive the sludge from the Biorock system, and digest it using macrofauna. The paper will present the initial trial results.