Floating Toilets: To Boldy "Go" Where Noone has Been Able to Go Before

Wetlands Work!, Phnom Phen, Cambodia

ID: CWH0

Relevant Skills: product design, sanitation, fluid mechanics, appropriate technology, manufacturing

Wetlands Work Ltd is a social enterprise based in Cambodia, working on sanitation and wastewater treatment. The HandyPod is novel sanitation solution developed by Wetlands Work! for users in floating villages. Floating villages on Cambodia's Tonle Sap lake are communities of varying sizes, with up to several thousand households each, and dwellings in such communities are kept afloat with a mix of bamboo, clay jars, fifty gallon metal drums, and other means. To this day, no sanitation system has been available for floating households. Conventional pit latrines cannot be installed as the houses are moved on the lake with the seasons, and the water level of the lake fluctuates between 0.5 m and 10 m annually.

The HandyPod is a floating system that sequesters and treats the sewage from a floating house. We have refined the design over several years of testing the system in a floating village and are currently piloting a sanitation marketing approach to making the system available to users in floating communities.

A current research need is the refinement of some aspects of the design. For example, the system currently uses rigid PVC piping for conveyance, which may not be the optimal solution for system life-span. Various substitutions of materials and adjustments to the manufacturing and assembly process may be possible to decrease the cost of the system and increase its longevity. A parallel design issue is to adapt the system to stilted houses. With stilted houses, the conveyance of waste from the latrine pan to the treatment module is a challenge due to the drastic fluctuations in water level over the course of the year.

The desired outcomes of efforts on these issues would include design and fabrication of prototypes that improve on the current design, which could be piloted in floating communities, and ideally result in higher uptake of sanitation products in floating villages.