"Globally, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation services, coupled with poor hygiene practices, kills and sickens thousands of children every day and leads to impoverishment and diminished opportunities for thousands more. The United Nations (UN), has recognized water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) as major issues that greatly affect the global poor. Under its Millennium Development Goals, the UN has set targets for addressing these issues. Namely, the UN aims to reduce by 50% the proportion of the global population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. In 2010, the target of halving the proportion of people without access to improved sources of water was met five years ahead of schedule. Despite progress, 2.5 billion people in developing countries still lack access to improved sanitation facilities. As a result, the vision of WaSH is incomplete. Often, lack of access to basic sanitation is a daily reality for persons residing in informal settlements. The focus of this thesis was an area called Zwelitsha in the informal settlement of Langrug. Located in Stellenbosch Municipality near Cape Town, South Africa, Zwelitsha currently has few functional toilets for its 604 residents. As a result, persons resort to open defecation, contributing to environmental contamination and possible disease transmission throughout the settlement. Thus, sanitation is a significant need for Zwelitsha. Advancing the work of the Cape Town Project Centre (CTPC) – a center location within the Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division of Worcester Polytechnic Institute – this thesis aimed to address the shortcomings in the provision of sanitation services within Zwelitsha. Through research, urine divergent dehydration and composting toilet systems were found to be the most technically feasible and applicable for meeting the sanitation needs of Zwelitsha. Favorable characteristics of these systems include independence from a connection to water pipes, sewerage, and energy sources and the generation of usable agricultural products. Both household level and community level options were proposed in this thesis. Proposed systems can be integrated into a large-scale WaSH facility with additional services such as water taps, sinks, toilets, showers, laundry stations, recreational areas, gardens, and salons for local business. "

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Duke University, 2008.

Thesis (M.S.P.H.)--University of Michigan, 1938.

Thesis (M.P.H.)--University of Michigan, 1944.

Thesis (M.S.P.H.)--University of Michigan, 1938.

Thesis (M.P.H.)--University of Michigan, 1944.

Approximately 2.5 billion people in the world currently lack access to adequate sanitation facilities. Improving sanitation access in the developing world is vitally important to public health, economies, and the environment. Non-governmental organizations and the private sector have played a significant role in increasing sanitation access through the construction of sanitation and hygiene systems. However, these projects have been plagued with sustainability problems with the rate of non-functional systems remaining consistently at 30 to 40 percent since the 1980s. Studies have found that meaningful community engagement and the consideration of community capacity during project development are vitally important to long-term project sustainability. However, development practitioners frequently undervalue the importance of these factors and fail to adequately employ them when developing sanitation projects. This thesis examines the dominance and impact of one key influence that leads development practitioners to overlook community context and engagement – the prioritization and overvaluation of technological solutions to development problems. Through a case study of the Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) Latrine built by three University of Massachusetts Amherst engineers in Nyakrom Ghana I demonstrate an example of the impact that a technocratic focus can have on the operation and maintenance sustainability of a sanitation project. In this thesis I maintain that the technocratic focus of this project is not unique but is part of a larger trend toward technocracy among water, sanitation, and hygiene development donors and practitioners. These technological approaches can neglect the important role that political, social, economic, and cultural factors play in increasing sanitation access. This thesis reviews three frameworks that the MFC Latrine engineers and other practitioners could use to better understand and incorporate community capacity and participation into sanitation projects – Asset Based Community Development, the appropriate technology framework by the World Health Organization and IRC Water and Sanitation Centre, and the WASHTech Technology Applicability Framework.

Dissolved air flotation (DAF) is an attractive solid/liquid separation process for highly colored, low turbidity water supplies. Low density floc is produced when these waters are coagulated, therefore DAF may be more effective than conventional gravity settling (CGS). Communities required to filter their supplies should consider DAF as an alternative pretreatment prior to filtration. Although DAF is a promising alternative to CGS, no rational basis has been developed for selection, design and operation of DAF facilities. The research objectives were: (1) to develop a fundamental basis for the application of DAF to water treatment, (2) to determine via experiment the key variables which affect DAF performance for the removal of clay turbidity and natural organic matter (NOM), and (3) to compare DAF to CGS. A conceptual model was developed based on colloidal stability and particle deposition and used to identify the variables which affect DAF. The variables which included pH, coagulant type and dose, temperature, DOC and clay concentrations, flocculation time, DAF detention time, and bubble concentration were studied using synthetic waters. Synthetic waters were used to compare DAF to CGS. Synthetic waters were prepared from extracted aquatic fulvic acid and research grade montmorillonite clay--their use allowed water quality variables to be carefully controlled. Synthetic water results were then verified using two natural waters. Modelling predicted that particle stability and size, bubble size and rise rate, bubble volume concentration, and detention time would affect DAF performance. Experiments indicated particles must be coagulated for successful flotation. Temperature and flocculation time affected DAF performance in experiments using alum. It is hypothesized that the effects of cold temperature on DAF performance are due to changes in coagulation mechanism and the physical and chemical stability of the particles as it relates to charge and bound water at the surface. In addition, bubble volume affected DAF performance for high DOC waters and waters containing clay. Comparisons of DAF to CGS indicated that the DOC, organic halide precursors, and dissolved aluminum after treatment were comparable for both. However, DAF produced significantly lower turbidities than CGS, particularly at colder temperatures.

In this dissertation, I investigate how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England regarded and negotiated the fundamental personal issues of health, hygiene, and sanitation. I employ environmental archaeological and material data, in particular parasite remains, from six New England privy sites: three eighteenth-century sites in Newport, Rhode Island, and three nineteenth-century sites in Boston and New Hampshire. Two eighteenth-century sites belonged to households in the middling stratum of society: one was a poor, lower-class residence. Two nineteenth-century sites were working class- a tenement and a brothel, both in Boston; the third was the Chase House, an upper-class domicile in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The archaeological and documentary evidence reveal daily choices and their effects. All three eighteenth-century households used chamber pots; the middle-class privies also contained high-quality ceramics. Documents indicate that these families functioned as small-scale merchants. Their prosperity notwithstanding, all three sites revealed parasites, although the amount was considerably less in the middle-class remains than from the poorer household. The nineteenth-century privies reflect that era's inhabitants' increased attention to sanitation and medical treatments; all privies contained more ewers, basins, and medicine bottles. Parasites remained a problem for the working class: both the tenement and brothel privies show moderate levels of parasitic infection. No such evidence was found in the Chase House privy. The material evidence of chamber pots, wash basins, and medicine bottles, places alongside the indications of infection, reveal peoples' active concerns with issues of hygiene and health, and demonstrated also that attention to these issues increased from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Higher levels of household wealth may be linked to lower levels of infection in both eras, probably because of better access to medicines and clean water. The personal involvement revealed by the remains is also reflected in the era's changing social attitudes. The impoverished came to be seen as agents of their own misery whose only hope was to adopt the cleanliness of the upper classes. Poorer people without ready access to better sanitation were regarded as people choosing to live in squalor and, as such, unworthy and beyond help.