/ 23 September 2011

Drowning in waste

Drowning In Waste

The path between the old pit toilets and the classrooms is worn deep into the ground. Hundreds of feet pound back and forth every day. Next to the pit toilets are new flush toilets, their paint and metal gleaming under the sun’s heat. But the grass is growing around their foundations and layers of dust have settled in their entrances. Nobody uses them because they do not work.

Ramollo Primary School is just off the new tar road between Polokwane and Giyani in Limpopo. Already the road has brought much prosperity: mud houses are making way for brick ones and spaza shops are morphing into shopping centres.

Laid out in a large compound Ramollo has new classrooms and a dusty football pitch where students eagerly tackle each other to repeat the heroics of their favourite teams. But while we are walking around the school the headmaster points to the neat row of new flush toilets and says: “They are white elephants.”

A borehole with an electric pump was installed for the toilets but it had insufficient capacity. The headmaster dreams of tapping into the village’s water supply but worries the demand by his 400 pupils might be too much. With the flushing toilets not working, the pit toilets are filling rapidly. This is a huge problem for schools, he says.

Four other schools the Mail & Guardian visits in the Mopani district have the same problem. The toilets that do work are crippled by erratic water supply. Although teachers at these schools talk about the problems this creates, they are quick to say that the same thing is happening in their communities.

Standing in his yard, Jacob Monyela is keen to show you his pit toilet: “It’s full.”

The toilet was built in 2000 and Monyela says it was a big moment for his family. They got sick less often and it generally improved their lives, but the pit filled up this year. Initially they used neighbours’ toilets, but now these are nearly full and they have to start relieving themselves in the bush. Although most of his neighbours are still better off, they are also waiting for their toilets to be emptied.

Huge sanitation projects
Since the late 1990s the government has rolled out huge sanitation projects as part of the reconstruction and development programme. According to the general household survey for 2010 the percentage of households without toilets or using the bucket system dropped from 12.6% in 2002 to 6% last year. In Limpopo the number stands at 8.8%.

But more than a decade after some of these toilets were built, many are now full. In provinces such as Limpopo the situation is compounded by a lack of fully functional systems to deal with the problem.

The standard toilet is the ventilated improved pit (VIP), mooted in a water affairs and forestry white paper as early as 1994: “Adequate basic provision is therefore defined as one well-constructed VIP toilet per household.” Between two and three million have been built.

The VIP has a pipe at the back to bring air into the system, eliminating flies and smells and lowering the chances of diseases spreading. When built properly it is as hygienic as a flush toilet. It also has a slab at the back that can be taken out so that the pit can be emptied.

But many municipalities either do not have good programmes in place to empty toilets, or the toilets were built so badly that they are difficult to empty. A review of sanitation policy and practice from 2001 to 2008, conducted for the Water Research Commission, found that most municipalities did not have plans for emptying toilets. It says municipalities were implementing “large numbers of VIP toilets without any operation and maintenance plans for emptying full pits”. It also says the design of most VIP toilets “did not make provision for emptying”.

David Still, founder of Partners in Development, who has been researching the problem in all parts of South Africa, says it is relevant to all toilets that were built “more than 10 years ago”. Although emptying is handled at the municipal level it takes place on an “ad-hoc basis”, with responses whenever there is a crisis, instead of being planned in advance.

Phillip Chauke, chief director of monitoring and evaluation at the department of human settlement, says the problem is acute because toilets fill up in five to six years. At the moment people who need to have their toilet emptied return to the waiting list for toilets, which slows both processes down. But his department is “rolling out a national programme” to help municipalities with their water and sanitation backlogs, he says. The treasury has provided R2-billion for this.

Backlog
Although his department takes the lead on all sanitation issues, Chauke says municipalities request their own funding from the municipal infrastructure grant. In most cases, the requests are for help with immediate problems such as getting “honeysucker” trucks that can empty toilets.

Given the backlog, Chauke says his department is trying to move municipalities towards building double-pit toilets to extend their life. Although the ideal is water-borne sewage and flush toilets, this is not feasible in rural areas, he says, and the focus is on improving sewage plants so that the waste from toilets can be recycled.

A success case is the eThekwini municipality in Kwazulu-Natal, where an integral system has been created to empty 35000 toilets and recycle the waste for compost. With the backlog cleared, households are given free toilet emptying every five years.