POVERTY: Banana peel can purify water, say scientists

Daniela Hirschfeld : 17 March 2011
 Flickr/Karl Faktor
The peels can perform even better than conventional purification materials

[ Banana peels can be used to purify drinking water contaminated with toxic heavy metals such as copper and lead, according to a study.
Researchers from the Bioscience Institute at Botucatu, Brazil, said that the skins can outperform even conventional purifiers such as aluminium oxide, cellulose and silica. These have potentially toxic side effects and are expensive.
The team's method follows previous work that showed that plant parts, such as apple and sugar cane wastes, coconut fibres and peanut shells, can remove toxins from water.
These natural materials contain chemicals that have an affinity for metals.
"I was at home eating bananas when I had the idea: 'Why not make something with this?'" Gustavo Rocha de Castro, a researcher at the institute and co-author of this study, told SciDev.Net.
De Castro and colleagues dried the peels in the sun for a week, ground them and added them to river water containing known concentrations of copper and lead. They found that the peels absorbed 97 per cent of the metals after just one hour.
The peels were tested in the lab and worked perfectly. Eventually their efficiency reduces, at which point the metals should be removed from the skins so that they can be disposed of safely.
Castro said that, although the peels were tested only on copper and lead, the material could also work on cadmium, nickel and zinc.
But he warned that this sort of filter is better suited to industrial purposes and cannot be used for water purification at home as the extraction capacity of banana skins depends on the particle size of the heavy metals — and this is difficult to measure.
Dimitris Kalderis, a wastewater treatment expert at the Department of Environmental Engineering in the Technical University of Crete, Greece, said: "The results are very promising, and the banana peel process has proven to be a cost-effective and quick alternative to conventional methods".
"I think that a small automated system to use either at home or at a central point for multiple families could be developed. The knowledge is there, what we need right now is innovation and construction."
The study was published in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research last month (16 February).
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/banana-peel-can-purify-water-say-scientists.html

POVERTY: ZIMBABWE: Growing risk of waterborne diseases in rural areas

MHONDORO, 3 January 2012 (IRIN)

 Photo: Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)
An aid worker treats a cholera patient in Beitbridge, Zimbabwe, on the border with South Africa during the 2008/2009 outbreak of the waterborne disease

Barbra Phiri, 20, a single mother living on a farm settlement in rural Mhondoro, about 45km southwest of the Zimbabwean capital Harare, does not think twice about letting her two-year-old twins splash about in a pool of greenish water close to her hut.
Since the rains began several weeks ago, dirty water has been accumulating on the settlement, now home to hundreds of former farmworkers and others displaced during Operation Murambatsvina in 2005 which razed illegal structures and left thousands without shelter.
Phiri remembers the 2008-2009 outbreak of cholera which killed more than 4,000 people and infected nearly 100,000 others, but sees it as a thing of the past and is still ignorant of how waterborne diseases are spread.
Her twins have a skin infection and frequent bouts of diarrhoea but, like most residents, she attributes such ailments to witchcraft, consulting a traditional healer for a cure.
Phiri told IRIN her first child died two years ago from diarrhoea. “We don’t use dirty water for drinking or cooking. We get clean water from the dam or the wells, so how can our children die from waterborne diseases?” she asked.
A few metres from Phiri’s hut is an overflowing pit latrine. Many inhabitants have resorted to relieving themselves in the open since most of their pit latrines are overflowing and unusable.
The 2009 Multiple Indicator Monitoring Survey (MIMS), compiled by the government and UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), listed diarrhoea as one of the major causes of infant mortality resulting in around 4, 000 deaths in Zimbabwe annually.
With the advent of the rainy season and poor sanitary and hygienic facilities, people living in rural and peri-urban settlements like Phiri’s are vulnerable to waterborne diseases.
The survey said: “Recent assessments show a significant decline in rural sanitation sector performance,” adding: “The inability of vulnerable populations to access safe water and basic sanitation… has resulted in frequent diarrhoeal and cholera outbreaks.”
The Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP) for Zimbabwe, launched in early December 2011, said “a third of rural Zimbabweans still drink from unprotected water sources and are thus exposed to waterborne diseases,” and noted reports of cholera cases in rural Chipinge, in the eastern province of Manicaland, and Chiredzi in the southeast of the country.

More people seek treatment
A senior nurse at a clinic in rural Seke District, about 50km south of Harare, who preferred anonymity, told IRIN the number of people seeking treatment for diarrhoea and dysentery had increased since the onset of the rains.
“Typical of this time of the year when the rains fall, we treat a high number of people suffering from waterborne diseases… We have not received any cases of cholera but there is need to be on the alert all the time, because the surrounding villages are characterized by poor hygiene and sanitation. Many villagers tend to relieve themselves in the open because they cannot rehabilitate the Blair pit toilets that were built long ago,” she said.
Blair pit toilets were constructed in large numbers to improve rural sanitation in the 1980s. A fine wire mesh allowed gases produced by decomposition to escape, but prevented flies around the faecal matter from exiting the septic tank and so prevented the spread of diseases.
The boreholes that were drilled in the 1980s have broken down and only a few that were sunk in recent years still function
According a 2011 report by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the government entitled A Situational Analysis on the Status of Women’s and Children’s Rights in Zimbabwe, 2005-2010 42 percent of people in rural communities practised open defecation, while cholera, which used to see significant outbreaks every 10 years or so in the 1980s and 1990s, has now become an annual event.
Poor household income, the senior nurse said, prevented some villagers from seeking treatment, “meaning that the number of people suffering from waterborne diseases could be higher as some of the cases go unreported [as people cannot afford to travel to clinics].”
David Shoniwa, 65, from Dema village in Seke District, said people in his community tended to relieve themselves along river beds during the dry season.
“The boreholes that were drilled in the 1980s have broken down and only a few that were sunk in recent years still function while, due to poor rains, it is difficult to sink new wells. When the rains fall, people turn to the rivers for water to drink and use for cooking, thereby exposing themselves to the diseases carried by the human waste,” Shoniwa told IRIN.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=94575

POVERTY: Sanitary energy thru toilets

May 23, 2011


2.5 billion people throughout the world don't have access to their own toilet. This leaves 2.5 billion people vulnerable to diseases such as cholera, diarrhea. These diseases are spread thru contaminated water as people are forced to use the outdoors instead of toilets to relive themselves.
Some non-profits and some social entrepreneurs have looked at ways of solving the problem by providing sanitation solutions to the poor. A team of engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a way make a business venture out of the human waste. Instead of selling inexpensive toilets to the poor, they have found away to convert the waste into energy that can be sold back into the grid.
From Forbes Magazine blogs, writer Elmira Bayrasli introduces us to Sanergy founded by MIT grads David Auerbach and Ani Vallabhaneni.
Auerbach and Vallabhaneni knew what they didn’t know. What they didn’t know was that they couldn’t draft up a sanitation solution in Boston – without the insights and input of those in the developing world. Committed to launching a start-up that would truly work for the poor, the two, along with a team of MIT classmates traveled to Kenya for the answers. Kenya, with eight million without access to proper sanitation but a university filled with bright and eager minds to help solve the problem, was an ideal testing ground. In January 2010 the team, in collaboration with the University of Nairobi, conducted a user survey among Kenya’s urban poor, inquiring about their lives. “It was important to us that we found a solution that fit into their lives, not our imagination of their lives,” Auerbach says.
What they found was that Kenya’s poor were interested in having compact stalls that could fit into the tight spaces of their usually one-room homes, rather than large community outhouses. They wanted a “permanent” feel to the stalls rather than the flimsy feel of a porta-potty. As a result, Auerbach, Vallabhaneni and their Sanergy team that includes engineers, architects and designers drew up plans for a 3×5 toilet made out of thin shell cement that is locally produced for $200 per unit. Each toilet is designed for a 100 uses per day. They are units, which also collect waste in double-sealed 30L containers, rather than pits, or septic tanks “that are then drained into waterways.” It is this waste collection that is key.
More than where to go to the bathroom, how to dispose of human waste is, as Auerbach points out, a primary reason that no one touches the issue of toilets. That was Sanergy’s opportunity. Recognizing that, though “messy,” human waste can be converted through anaerobic digestion to produce fertilizer or electricity. It is also where the Sanergy team recognized that it could generate revenue.
Sanergy produces toilets that are franchised to local operators who charge around $0.06 per use. Currently the company has two toilets serving approximately 150 each day. One is at Bridge International school (a for-profit school supported by the Omidyar Network), the other in Kibera, Kenya’s largest slum. These local operators keep all revenues. That, Auerbach says, is an incentive for them to clean, maintain and “market” the toilets. The operators then work with groups who collect the waste daily and bring it to facilities where it is converted to energy. “The waste from each toilet generates Sanergy revenues of $1250 per year.” The waste from 10 million creates a potential market of $178 million per year. Brown gold.
http://povertynewsblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/sanitary-energy-thru-toilets.html