News

Grietje Zeeman and ‘New Sanitation’ with LeAF

Published on
September 19, 2017

Grietje Zeeman works on the topic of New Sanitation since 1999 both at Wageningen University - Environmental Technology and with LeAF. Since October 2016 she retired from Wageningen university, but she is very inspired to continue her work with LeAF. ‘New Sanitation’ is an emerging field with several implementations in The Netherlands and several others in progress, not only in The Netherlands but also abroad.

LeAF was and is involved in several of these implementation projects, like in Gent, Zutphen, Lochem, Wageningen and Amsterdam. Grietje Zeeman works together with Jan Weijma and Tiemen Nanninga on ‘New Sanitation‘ projects for industrialised countries. Recently a large EU-horizon-2020 project, ‘Run4Life’, coordinated by Aqualia in Spain, was approved, with LeAF as one of  the project partners. Within this project 4 new large ‘New Sanitation’ demonstrations, in Spain, The Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden, will be established, monitored and researched; a significant step forward in the application of ‘New Sanitation’.  

Within LeAF, ‘New Sanitation’ is not only addressed for application in industrialised countries but certainly also for application in the South. The challenges are very different. Billions of people in the South have not yet adequate sanitation. ‘New Sanitation’ does not only offer the necessary sanitation provisions but also delivers sanitation products that can locally be used for cooking, toilet flushing, irrigation and fertilisation in for example local agriculture. LeAF is involved in projects in Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya and Ghana. Darja Kragic and Grietje Zeeman work together in these projects.

‘New Sanitation’ can be defined as the recovery of resources from domestic wastewater based on source separated waste streams. The separation of concentrated (faeces, urine (=black water), kitchen waste) and diluted (shower, bath, kitchen and laundry water(= grey water)) waste streams from the household enables the energy efficient recovery of biogas, nutrients, organics and water. ‘New Sanitation’ can be applied at several scales with different degrees of separation depending on the specific location, viz. new or existing building, urban or rural area. 

For more information you can contact Grietje Zeeman