Minutes from the meeting of the IWA specialist group on Ecological Sanitation in Lübeck April 10th of 2003

  1. Ralf Otterpohl, chairman of the Specialist group on Sustainable Sanitation, opened the meeting by welcoming every one.
  2. The agenda of the meeting was agreed upon as are given in these minutes.
  3. The name of the specialist group. When the group was formed in Berlin in 2001 it was named "Sustainable Sanitation”. Ecological Sanitation is meanwhile the internationally most widely used term for the type of sanitation studied and promoted by the "Sustainable Sanitation” group. Therefore, Ralf suggested that the group should change its name to "Specialist group on Ecological Sanitation”. This suggestion was agreed on by all attending the meeting.
  4. Ralf informed of EcoSan activities within the IWA. He had been asked by IWA managing director Paul Reiter to chair a session on Ecological Sanitation at the IWA Leading Edge Conference in Venice, 2002. This resulted in a request to arrange an IWA session on EcoSan at the 3rd World Water Forum 2003 in Kyoto, Japan. This session was a great success and even attended by the IWA president Prof. Tambo. In total three EcoSan sessions were arranged in Kyoto. The one by IWA and two by EcoSanRes, Sweden. In addition EcoSan presentations where also given in two sessions organised by UNEP and the Japan Toilet Association. In total there were some 350 events at Kyoto, but the three EcoSan Sessions competed successfully for the audience. Videos of the sessions are to be published at www.ecosanres.org.
  5. An important future event is the IWA biannual conference in the autumn of 2004 in Marrakech, Morocco. The specialist group is lobbying to have the term Ecological Sanitation included as a specific topic in the overhead call and to have a special session dedicated to Ecological Sanitation. We do not know how successful this will be. Therefore, it is important that the titles of the papers sent in contain the term Ecological Sanitation. This increases the chance of a special dedicated EcoSan session being arranged.
  6. The forming of an EcoSan discussion forum on the internet was discussed. It was agreed that presently it is better that we use the existing EcoSan discussion forum of EcoSanRes (join on www.ecosanres.org) instead of forming a new one of our own.
  7. Information was given on some neighbouring specialist conferences that might be of interest:
    Constructed wetlands, September 2004,
    Anaerobic digestion, September 2004, Canada.
  8. Ralf plans an IWA handbook on Ecological Sanitation and asked for expression of interest to co-operate via email. The subject line of the email should read "IWA handbook” and details of the subjects that can be covered should be given. He pointed out that it was important that the contributions will be quantitative including design criteria.
  9. The website of the group was discussed. Presently, it is located at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg. The address is www.tuhh.de/susan. Meanwhile Ralf could reserve the site www.ecosan.org (surprise it was free) that will be used for our IWA group. We are also working on having it linked from the IWA website. You are all invited to send material (NO commercials, please) and links to this websites describing your EcoSan activities. We will include these links on the website.
  10. The meeting was closed by Ralf, thanking everyone for their attendance.

Writing the notes: Håkan Jönsson, Co-chair of the specialist group Ecological Sanitation.