“Shit can move on trucks.”

On the outskirts of Bangalore, India’s tech capital, an office doubles as a museum of the toilet. An exhibit in one room traces the history of sanitation, from ancient Mesopotamian sewers to Europe’s first flush toilets and the modern sewer systems built to process the waste they spurt out. Then, another exhibit turns to the global sanitation crisis — including a sculpture of naked babies representing the half-million children under 5 who die from diarrhea annually — and technologies to tackle it.

CDD Society, the nonprofit housing the display, wants Indians to think outside the sewer. It has built India’s first citywide fecal sludge treatment plant, which turns human excreta into compost with no electricity and no connection to an underground sewer…. The organization and India are only part of a growing trend across multiple developing countries, where governments, entrepreneurs and nonprofits are eschewing Western-style sewer systems that use vast piped networks to deliver waste to centralized treatment plants.

Instead, they are opting for decentralized approaches to treating poo and pee. Their models rely on trucks to transport waste to systems like septic tanks and latrine pits that use less water than sewers and recycle human waste. They are pitching themselves as the answer to the global sanitation crisis: 2.5 billion people, a third of the world’s population, lack access to a toilet, while an estimated 80 percent of human waste worldwide goes untreated.

Read more: Why Cities are Starting to Shun Sewers. Previously: Recycling animal and human dung is the key to sustainable farming.

After the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti nearly 1.5 million people in the capitol were living in camps without access to sanitation. In response to the crisis, international agencies installed thousands of toilets within weeks. However, the absence of waste treatment facilities in the country further complicated the sanitation response.

The first treatment facility constructed post – earthquake was a thermophilic composting site designed to treat the wastes from 20,000 earthquake victims living in camps. Despite multiple hurricanes, a cholera epidemic, and political unrest, the SOIL composting facilities have treated over 500,000 gallons of human waste in the past three years, converting it to pathogen free compost, over 10,000 gallons of which has been sold for use in agriculture and reforestation projects.

The experience of thermophilic composting in Haiti is unique in scale and duration and can have global implications for waste treatment in both emergency and development contexts. The simple infrastructure requirements relative to more advanced technological approaches allow for rapid implementation in the wake of a disaster. The infrastructure itself is not dependent on an energy source and materials for construction can be sourced locally. Additionally, the straightforward operation and maintenance facilitate locally managed repairs and on-going service provision.

Thermophilic composting of human wastes in uncertain urban environments: a case study from Haiti (PDF), SOIL Haiti.

Livestock at waste management park in Bobbili, India

Lowly as it may seem, Bobbili prides itself on its zero-waste zone with a comprehensive recycling system that ensures nothing goes to the landfill. Their unique solution involves door-to-door collection of household waste strictly separated as dry and wet, and the 2010 ban on plastic. The spotlight of the scheme is the Municipal Solid Waste Park – a 8.5-acre site comprising a bio-compost yard handling 2.5 to 3 tonnes of organic waste a day. The most innovative part is the utilisation of livestock.

A 2012 report by India’s Regional Centre for Urban and Environmental Studies states that “animals are the part of the solution, not the problem. The livestock’s potential contribution in solving environmental problems is equally large. The livestock contribute to tackle our environmental degradation by a variety of ways.”

By 2012 the park kept 4 chickens, 21 ducks, 6 pigs and other animals for different functions. Chickens are benefited from the insects in the waste, whilst pigs would gulp the food waste collected from hotels. Ducks take care of the leftovers collected from the fish market. Dogs are in charge of domestic leftovers. The ‘park farm’ is probably the first in the world to implement animal feed on a municipal level.

Solid Waste Management Park in Bobbili, India

The animal farm takes its inspiration from the history of feeding animals with organic waste. Dogs, especially domesticated ones, are effective in taking care of meat scraps. As a common practice in traditional pig farming, pigs often consume the leftovers, rather than energy and cost-intensive crops. Ducks and chickens respectively favour kitchen scraps and milling by-products. Given the extraordinary effectiveness of earthworms to decompose vegetable and food wastes, vermicompost is another key of this living waste management system.

Besides the fact that landfill relief means avoided methane emission, animal waste can be a sustainable source of natural fertiliser whose cost and carbon footprint are way lower than artificial ones. More importantly, because the system doesn’t involve complex technologies, it can be easilly implemented – though in a smaller scale – on household levels. Just by keeping dogs and resuming the tradition of backyard chicken, we can easily reduce kitchen scraps and contribute to a significant cut in food waste.

This is a guest post by Ren Wan, a writer and sustainability advocate who is based in Hong Kong. She runs JupYeah, an online swapping platform, is a managing editor for WestEast Magazine, and blogs at Loccomama. Ren previously wrote about Furoshiki, a square cloth that with different wrapping techniques can basically transport anything.

Mathew Lippincott writes: “I read with great relish your new article on human manure. I’ve been working on a project along the same wavelength. There is a small group of people (including ourselves) here in Portland, Oregon who have really gone for humanure, and we’re organizing. Through ReCode Oregon we’re proposing code changes to allow for user-built composting toilet systems. My partner Molly and I just completed six posters on the the topic of sewage, toilets, and nutrient cycles. I hope you like them. We’re working to design composting portable toilets right now, and the lack of knowledge amongst most people on soil processes and nutrient cycles was making us crazy.”

Click to enlarge.

The posters are for sale. Six posters for $5 or 12 posters for $7. Or get them for free if you promise to put them up in restrooms around Portland. More on the project at Cloacina.