The SOIL Guide to Ecological Sanitation

The guide is based on five years of SOIL's experience with ecological sanitation (EcoSan) in Haiti and focuses on urine-diversion toilets. Its sections cover the management of toilets, education and inauguration, monitoring and evaluation, technical specifications, drawings and bills of quantities for toilets, and an operations guide and technical specifications for an offsite composting facility. It includes an introduction that sets Haiti's sanitation and soil problems in the context of deforestation, rural poverty and low sanitation coverage.

The guide states that SOIL has built over 250 public EcoSan toilets, set up five composting sites in Port-au-Prince and northern Haiti, and produced over 150,000 gallons of compost from human waste. It sets a minimum of one week at 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius) for safe treatment of pathogens by composting. It reports that double-vault toilets in Haiti's humid climate did not decompose or sterilize waste in the chamber, so it recommends secondary composting or rigorous pathogen testing before agricultural use. SOIL says its operations cover Port-au-Prince and three northern communities and that it cannot build toilets across the country.