Here are some simple solutions for managing human waste in disaster situations. With a simple change in the way we view human waste we can create resources. By design we can assist communities to respond to disaster, and to come back stronger, wiser, and richer.
We understand that a big challenge in communities in the affected
region of biobio chile is what to do with ´human waste´. We are
proposing the installation of emergency dry toilets for families and
public. This will quickly reduce the risk of disease, and the need for
water. There are many model toiets
that are in use around the world in poor communities, and more recently
in Haiti post terremoto.
Cory Brennan in Haiti 10 Marzo 2010 ´´One of the team members, Rodrigo Silva, has built compost toilets for festivals for 30,000 people. They are using whatever methods are suitable for each area where they are working. You can build them practically any way you want to, if the principles are there - keep the feces isolated so they don't contaminate water supply, etc (urine is ok to use as fertilizer once diluted 10-1); make sure the temperature of the compost is high enough to kill the pathogens; ensure some "brown" organic material is mixed in with the solid material.´´
John Calvert 10 Marzo 2010 ´´I would just add that a low-cost composting toilet is typically either a bucket-dump type or plant-a-tree type. Bucket type works very well and is appropriate for urban or rural areas where there is the opportunity to make a compost pile to receive humanure & urine and other organic material (this must of course be done properly, then the result is excellent garden fertilizer). The bucket is housed in a containing box (for example made out of plywood) with a hole cut in the top and normal toilet seat and lid. The box top itself is a hinged lid, for removal of the bucket when full. Sawdust or other dry organic material is thrown in the bucket after each use – sawdust works very well, but fine leaf duff also works. The toilet seat can be constructed inside an outhouse. A variation is to have a two-holer, one for humanure, the other for urine. Urine mixed with water is immediately usable as fertilizer for some types of plants. For rural areas, the plant-a-tree type toilet can be used, and there are variants of this. The most common and private is the portable outhouse type, in which a hole is dug and the outhouse placed over it, and then when full the outhouse is moved and the hole filled. Later a tree is planted in the hole.´´
Ecological sanitation is a low-cost approach to sanitation where human wastes are collected, composted and recycled for use in agriculture and reforestation. Itn Haiti this has simultaneously addressed many of the most pressing issues: improving public health, increasing household income and agricultural productivity, mitigating environmental degradation, and providing low-cost sanitation for rural communities.
On a yearly basis a human produces roughly 500 liters of urine and 50 liters of feces. These two products contain enough nutrients to grow most of the plants that this person needs as food. However instead of utilizing these 550 liters as a resource, we mix it with roughly 15,000 liters of water, andit all goes down the drain, often directly into water resources. Before it reaches the sewage plant, if there is one, this slurry gets mixed with hundreds of pollutants along the way. You can read more about this here http://www.esrla.com/pdf/toilet.pdf.
You can find information here about what is happening in Haiti with the WASH Innovation Project: a collaboration between SOIL/SOL and OXFAM UK which includes constructing 25 indoor dry toilets and 4 public dry toilets, and establishing a waste composting site. SOIL has various designs for emergency toilets that are cheap, quick effective and enable us to turn human waste into a resource rather than a contaminant and disease risk. You can read more about them here http://oursoil.org/what/resources#compost and here http://oursoil.org/what/resources/wash.
Spanish
Here is a pdf in español 
John Calvert 10 Marzo 2010 ´´I would just add that a low-cost composting toilet is typically either a bucket-dump type or plant-a-tree type. Bucket type works very well and is appropriate for urban or rural areas where there is the opportunity to make a compost pile to receive humanure & urine and other organic material (this must of course be done properly, then the result is excellent garden fertilizer). The bucket is housed in a containing box (for example made out of plywood) with a hole cut in the top and normal toilet seat and lid. The box top itself is a hinged lid, for removal of the bucket when full. Sawdust or other dry organic material is thrown in the bucket after each use – sawdust works very well, but fine leaf duff also works. The toilet seat can be constructed inside an outhouse. A variation is to have a two-holer, one for humanure, the other for urine. Urine mixed with water is immediately usable as fertilizer for some types of plants. For rural areas, the plant-a-tree type toilet can be used, and there are variants of this. The most common and private is the portable outhouse type, in which a hole is dug and the outhouse placed over it, and then when full the outhouse is moved and the hole filled. Later a tree is planted in the hole.´´
On a yearly basis a human produces roughly 500 liters of urine and 50 liters of feces. These two products contain enough nutrients to grow most of the plants that this person needs as food. However instead of utilizing these 550 liters as a resource, we mix it with roughly 15,000 liters of water, andit all goes down the drain, often directly into water resources. Before it reaches the sewage plant, if there is one, this slurry gets mixed with hundreds of pollutants along the way. You can read more about this here http://www.esrla.com/pdf/toilet.pdf.
