Reinventing water and sanitation is not easy. As a country, we haven’t even tried. We gave in to World Bank suggestions which are neither cost effective nor relevant to our demographics and geography.
For one we have a lot of people and bovine animals. Second, vegetarians generate human waste which is far more in volume terms than that generated by non-vegetarians. Third, we still have considerable rural populations where conventional water supply and sewage networks don’t make sense. Over the last few months, my search for suitable technologies has taken me to two role models – one is the Jalasya stack developed in India. The other is the Johkasou STP stack from Japan. When we add these two stacks together – we can pretty much solve for any kind of community – from 200 to 200 lacs.
Kamal Tiwari and Christina W. are both passionate experts in the area. Whilst Kamal is at the mass market end catering to municipal corporations and industries, Christina operates at the very top of the pyramid catering to luxury hotels seeking premium certifications like the Leeds Platinum and the Global Wellness Certification from Wellness Lifestyle. These are the only two known solutions anywhere in the world which remove antibiotics from the recycled water preventing antibiotic buildup which can lead to antibiotic resistance in human beings.
The Johkasau stack from Japan comprises of a water treatment system and a waste water treatment system. The former is based on electrostatic deionisation for softening and carbon derived filters for nano filtration. The latter uses a combination of sedimentation, anaerobic treatment, aerobic treatment and filtration. The logic is you can treat waste water locally an reuse the recovered water. The unit is sold as a packaged unit and just needs a small electric blower for operations. Based on sound Japanese technology, it is ideal for mixed waste comprising of grey water (wash and kitchen) and black water (flush from WC).
The Jalasya stack is designed for super premium applications like arid golf courses, luxury hotels and gated communities which are off grid. It is closely integrated with other systems – like the cop30 geothermal aircon systems and the graphene based water filtration plant – to deliver a completely integrated system for high tropical climates.
Unlike the Johkasau system which lets methane escape into the air, it recovers biogas. The first key attribute of the Jalasya stack is its ability to neutralise enzyme based detergent effluents. The second differentiator is its ability to separate the three streams – urine, black water and other grey water (including detergents). The urine is dehydrated and converted into a natural nitrogenous fertiliser.
The most interesting use case of the Jalasya stack is for high capacity applications like the Ganga ghats in Haridwar where it is proposed to recover the fecal matter in almost dry condition. A world first.
Centralised STP plants no longer make sense.
