Abstract
Reaching the Millennium Development Goals for Sanitation is a challenge. To address this challenge, numerous technological innovations have been developed. But with so many innovations and a wide range of existing technologies appropriate in different settings, difficulties with communication and knowledge dissemination hinder informed decision-making and the integration of all sanitation elements. This chapter describes a novel method for organizing and defining sanitation systems to facilitate informed decision-making and an integrated approach. Technologies are categorized based on their ‘Product-Process’ specificity and then linked into logical systems using a ‘Flowstream’ concept. Technologies are grouped and used to construct seven logical systems. Additionally, according to the flowstream, suitable technologies are grouped and given a score for each of the criteria. The advantages and shortcomings of the flowstream approach to sanitation system planning and the differences between ‘system’ and ‘technology’ are discussed and a set of terms and concepts that can be used to standardize the way in which sanitation is thought of and communicated about is proposed.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the entire NETSSAF consortium (www.netssaf.net) for their dedicated and supportive collaboration in this, and all other activities in the project. Additionally the authors would like to thank the European Union for funding this project under the EU-FP6 Framework. Finally the authors would like to acknowledge the support of: Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology and the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) North-South: Research Partnerships for Mitigating Syndromes of Global Change.
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Tilley, E., Zurbrügg, C., Lüthi, C. (2010). A Flowstream Approach for Sustainable Sanitation Systems. In: van Vliet, B., Spaargaren, G., Oosterveer, P. (eds) Social Perspectives on the Sanitation Challenge. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3721-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3721-3_5
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