Sanitation and Environmental Justice

Sewage Treatment Facilities 

South County Regional Wastewater Authority (SCRWA) a joint powers authority established to manage the treatment of wastewater for the Cities of Gilroy and Morgan Hill. In partnership with the Santa Clara Valley Water District, the SCRWA also operates a recycled water facility co-located at the treatment plant site. Its website showed that the SCRWA plant was built in 1990 and is a model of energy efficiency and cost effective operation. The plant uses state-of-the-art, fully automated, high-efficiency equipment to save costs and resources. The SCRWA reliably meets the steadily increasing demand for recycled water to irrigate local parks, golf courses, sports complex, landscape medians, agricultural and industrial uses. The plant’s remaining effluent is disposed of in percolation ponds. The ponds allow the water to soak into the soil and eventually add water to the underground aquifer. This is different from many other treatment plants in the Bay Area that discharge effluent directly to the Bay. Discharge to ponds requires a more stringent level of treatment than is required for Bay discharge.

Public awareness is the key...

Key facts

• In 2015, 39% of the global population (2.9 billion people) used a safely managed sanitation service – defined as use of a toilet or improved latrine, not shared with other households, with a system in place to ensure that excreta are treated or disposed of safely.
• 27% of the global population (1.9 billion people) used private sanitation facilities connected to sewers from which wastewater was treated.
• 13% of the global population (0.9 billion people) used toilets or latrines where excreta were disposed of in situ.
• 68% of the world’s population (5.0 billion people) used at least a basic sanitation service.
• 2.3 billion people still do not have basic sanitation facilities such as toilets or latrines.
• Of these, 892 million still defecate in the open, for example in street gutters, behind bushes or into open bodies of water.
• At least 10% of the world’s population is thought to consume food irrigated by wastewater.
• Poor sanitation is linked to transmission of diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio.
• Inadequate sanitation is estimated to cause 280 000 diarrhoeal deaths annually and is a major factor in several neglected tropical diseases, including intestinal worms, schistosomiasis, and trachoma. Poor sanitation also contributes to malnutrition

Because public awareness comes the assistance…

Bill Gates Foundation donated $42 million in grants to improve toilets. Before the end of the year, the foundation hopes to have 50 to 60 groups working on ideas for the next generation of toilets, which should run without water or electricity and not be attached to a sewer system. For example, "ecological sanitation toilet” converts human waste into safe and effective fertilizer, in poor countries like Malawi.

Matt Damon with Water.org partnered to improve sanitation in developing countries, one toilet at time, by providing small loans ($187 on average) for connecting to a water utility or building a latrine. It operates on a “pay it forward” system.

Combining the two global effort with a non-partisanpolitic local leadership to oversee the project will ensure the project to full completion. That said, setting up public toilet in public places is another effort that the Indian government can benefit from. 

Moreover, the Indian government should learn from other countries like Japan in which it builds its own resilient water supply and sanitation services.

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