Emeritus Professor, Environmental Technology, Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands

Abstract

   Proper concepts and technologies for attaining a sustainable, robust and social-economically affordable protection of the life environment for all people are available. They consist of concepts of Decentralised Sanitation and Resource Recovery and Reuse that are comprised of the use of treatment methods based on the Natural Biological Mineralization Route. The major difficulty is to get these systems/concepts implemented; it is more sociology than technology. Generally the short-term economic interests of well-established structures comprise the major bottleneck for making progress on the route to sustainable and robust public sanitation. However, regarding the enormous social and economic benefits of the decentralized sanitation and resource recovery-concept and natural biological mineralization-based treatment systems irrevocably will be substituted, for the nowadays applied, highly centralised sanitation concepts with their complex and expensive treatment methods. This process already is on the way in the industrial sector of environmental technology in many countries, while in the public sanitation sector promising developments occur in India and Latin America. Consequently, there are reasons to be optimistic for a drastic improvement of the life conditions of the poor.