The water-based sanitation has had its benefits in the improvement of public health and ecological status of the receiving water bodies. Still it has its shortcomings: huge amount of water as well as valuable nutrients such as organic carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous are lost. All the chemicals used in the households including mixture of consumable products, medicines and their metabolites and degradation products are led into waste water.
We have been active in developing safer and more sustainable sanitation technologies. The most recent activities in the field include the EU project DryCloset, where dry toilet technology is developed together with European organizations. The goal of the project is multiple: creation of a biocide material, prevention of the struvite precipitation and control of the odours generated by DryCloset with a biofilter.
The International Dry Toilet Conference is held every third year in Tampere. Tampere University of Technology organizes the conference together with Tampere University of Applied Sciences, University of Tampere and Global Dry Toilet Organization of Finland. We are in charge of organizing the pre-conference workshop “Safe and Sustainable Sanitation”. The workshop lectures are recorded and used on the web course together with assignments and other learning materials used at the workshop. The goal of the conference based online course is distribution of the latest sanitation knowledge to a wide audience and maximum exploitation of the research in teaching. Online course student satisfaction has also been studied in WWE in order to develop teaching and study possibilities for virtual course exchange and internationalization.
Reseachers
Marja Palmroth
Hilda Szabo
Maarit Särkilahti
Tuula Tuhkanen