“More than 2.6 billion people ­ forty per cent of the world’s population ­ lack basic sanitation facilities, and over one billion people still use unsafe drinking water sources. As a result, thousands of children die every day from diarrhoea and other water-, sanitation- and hygiene-related diseases and many more suffer and are weakened by illness.” WHO/UNICEF 2004

The statistics that tell us the terrible consequences of inadequate sanitation are shocking, but they are recited with such regularity they sound like raindrops falling on a roof; a steady, ordinary, drumming. 1.1 billion people in the world without safe water and 2.6 billion without adequate excreta disposal ­ hence the deaths of four children every minute of everyday. 40% of the world’s 400 million school-age children have intestinal worms. One in ten school-age African girls does not attend school during menstruation or drops out all together because of the lack of toilets in her school. And so on and so terribly on.

Proclamations exhorting us to increase the number of hygienic sanitation facilities, exclusively these are for the world’s poor, are commonplace. The Second World Water Forum at The Hague in 2000, the United Nations Millennium Declaration, and the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development all formally called for decreasing the number of people without safe water and adequate excreta disposal systems, cutting the problem in half by 2015 and eliminating it by 2025.

Such exhortations are commonplace. But concrete plans are nearly non-existent and so far those few that we have will either make whole new health and environmental problems or will merely move the pollution to new, as yet undefiled, locations. For instance, combining household, industrial, and commercial discharges makes the problem insoluble.

What must be done? Bring together people who approach sanitation from both a health and ecological perspective. Proselytize for “source separation” as a first principle. Find capital support for ecological waste management systems. Connect those who want sustainable sanitation technologies to those who can deliver, install, and maintain them. Work to enact policies that punish polluters, reward ecological innovators, and promote universal sustainable sanitation coverage. There’s more. The task of the Chemax Environmental Health Initiative - a joint project of RILES and the Boston University School of Public Health - is to show how. The Environmental Health Initiative’s goal is to demonstrate how ecological public works programs can be implemented on a scale that has a measurable impact on public health and the environment.

The Initiative will include public health research; policy initiatives, for instance, establishing financing mechanisms (bonds, grants, private partnerships, taxes, user fees, etc.) for on-site ecological sanitation systems; small business development; job training; and education. It will link students, public health and medical professionals, government representatives, and community members concerned about local environmental pollution, public health, and long-term solutions to environmental and health degradation. Core components will be to strengthen local institutions that deal with water, sanitation, and municipal planning and develop local and regional capacity to build and maintain technologies related to public infrastructure, such as composting toilets, that do not degrade the environment while at the same time meet community economic and aesthetic criterions.

This multi-phase, multi-year project will be based in a Mayan community, Chemax (population approximately 4,000 in the city center), in the state of Yucatan. RILES was invited to the town by masons living there and with whom we have worked for over 13 years. A fundamental goal of the effort is to contribute to the dialogue and working solutions of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and specifically, the MDGs’ target of halving by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

Project leaders:

Dr. Richard Clapp is an epidemiologist with over thirty years of experience in public health practice and consulting. He has been a full-time faculty member in the Department of Environmental Health at the Boston University School of Public Health since 1993. He has an MPH from Harvard School of Public Health and a D.Sc. in Epidemiology from B.U. School of Public Health. He has worked in state and local health departments as director of a community health center, a statewide childhood lead poisoning prevention program, the Massachusetts Cancer Registry, and an environmental health consulting group at JSI Research and Training Institute. His research has focused on cancer in military veterans and in communities with toxic or radiation hazards. He is currently working on community-based research in New England and pesticide health effects research in South Africa. He is the Director of the university’s Program for the Ecology of Human Systems, a program that seeks to increase popular understanding of the implications to human and environmental health of technological choices and to influence public policy respecting those choices. He is co-chair of the steering committee of Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility and serves on several other professional advisory committees.

Laura Orlando is the Executive Director of the ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems (RILES), an independent, Boston-based health and environmental organization founded in 1990. She also teaches at the Boston University School of Public Health and is the Associate Director of the university’s Program for the Ecology of Human Systems. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan (B.Sc. Civil Engineering) and Harvard University (Master of Public Administration). For nearly twenty years she has worked on international development projects on issues at the nexus of technology, community, and health. She serves on the board of directors of the Economic Affairs Bureau, a Cambridge-based education and publishing nonprofit; the Farmer’s Diner, a Vermont-based company concerned with strengthening rural farm economies; and the Business Advisory Council of Women for Women International, a DC-based nonprofit that works with women in conflict and post-conflict environments.

Lucio Tec Estrella, a resident of Chemax, is the President of the Green Ecologist Party (El Partido Verde Ecologista). He is a mason and built the first Nahi Xix composting toilet with Laura Orlando in Puerto Morelos, Mexico in 1993. He has worked with Laura since then. It was at Lucio’s invitation we came to Chemax to launch the Environmental Health Initiative.

Laura Orlando

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