In 2010, the UN General Assembly called for international efforts to help countries to provide safe, clean, accessible, and affordable drinking water and sanitation. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that 2.5 billion people have no access to safe, clean toilets, and 1 billion people are forced to defecate in the open. This leads to sickness and disease, including nearly 1,000 child deaths per day from water and sanitation-related diarrheal diseases. New approaches for sustainable non-sewered sanitation systems are a practical solution. Adding to the challenge, WHO estimates 2 billion people use latrines that aren’t properly drained, and 2 billion people use toilets that are connected to septic tanks that are not properly emptied. Without access to proper sewage treatment, pathogens from human waste make their way into the soil and water systems, contaminating food and water, and endangering human life.

ISO/PC 318 contributes to SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), which aims to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. ISO/PC 318 focuses on the development of an international standard that specifies performance and safety requirements of pre-fabricated community-scale resource oriented sanitation treatment systems supporting safe and sustainable fecal sludge management. The fecal sludge treatment units serve approximately 1,000 to 100,000 people. The purpose of these faecal sludge treatment units is to safely process human waste and recover valuable resources such as water, energy and/or nutrients through economically sustainable faecal sludge treatment technologies in off-grid and non-sewered environments. The standard will contain criteria for the functionality, usability, reliability, maintainability, and safety of faecal sludge treatment units that primarily treat faecal sludge, are able to operate in an off-grid and non-sewered environment, and are pre-fabricated.

In general, international standards are strategic tools helping to reduce costs by minimizing trial and error development and facilitating free and fair global trade. Sustainable Development Goal 6 states that everyone should have access to safe sanitation by 2030. Building conventional faecal treatment units is one solution to help achieve goal 6. However, there is no International Standard that contains commonly accepted criteria by which to measure their performance.

ISO 31800, a voluntary international standard, developed by experts around the globe, provides technical requirements and recommendation for manufacturers of faecal sludge treatment units, governments, regulators and operators (or service providers) to assure that the sanitation systems are safe, operable, reliable and environmentally friendly. In addition, ISO 31800 aims to facilitate the commercialization, scaling, and transfer of these faecal sludge treatment units into the market.

Overall, ISO 31800 helps ensure safety, performance, and sustainability for safer sanitation and greater public health —and supports people who lack access to adequate sanitation systems.

https://sanitation.ansi.org/Standard/ISOPC318