The Research
This is a multi-disciplinary challenge including governance, financing, cultural, and equity components, but there are also engineering aspects to the challenge of achieving universal safe and sustainable faecal sludge management with opportunities for improvement all along the faecal sludge management chain.
Our goals include:
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Partner strategically
Develop a strategic joint partnership with Oxfam and Water For People to conduct research across their priority global sanitation challenges
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Build better
Design, test and pilot a novel low-cost, lightweight, easier-to-assemble septic tank technology for households in developing countries.
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New technologies
Design, test and pilot novel latrine emptying / de-sludging technologies for safer and more efficient handling of waste
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Adapt & Grow
Design and test modular faecal Sludge treatment technologies and develop a decision-making framework for rapidly-urbanising small to medium-sized towns/cities and emergency humanitarian situations
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Recover resource
Engineering enhanced methods and technologies recovering valuable resources from faecal sludge.
We’ve had regular gold, blue gold - and now onto brown gold.
Addressing these engineering challenges will require combining
scientific understanding
process modelling
experimental design
testing of new technologies
using state-of-the-art laboratory
piloting techniques
co-design and co- execution of research
This Chair will involve Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, India, and Bangladesh in its research.
With this in mind, we are partnering with bright minds in the humanitarian sector, to ensure that we take into account the local contexts of acceptability, affordability, and sustainability.