Portable Sanitation Association International

ASSOCIATIONINSIGHT Portable Sanitation Association International News BIWEEKLY EDITION FEBRUARY 17, 2021 Page 15 Disposal Challenges Require Long-Term Planning and Investment…continued from page 14 • Other innovators are hard at work in creating smaller waste treatment technologies that may be a good fit for portable sanitation in the next few years. Check out some examples in this December 9, 2020 Association Insight article and this recording of a presentation at the PSAI's 2020 Virtual Convention and Trade Show. Presumably if you are having trouble finding local waste treatment options, your competitors will be in the same boat. Occasionally your competitors will have been grandfathered into some disposal option that you cannot access, or they may have their own onsite treatment. This will affect your calculations on what makes sense for you. But if you and your competitors are friendly, consider approaching them to create a cooperative for waste treatment. Farmers have used co-ops for years to pool resources for mutually required big-ticket items. Within the next few years—and certainly within the next 20 years—privately held treatment works owned cooperatively may become one of the more common ways that small businesses dispose of waste. Explore Waste Reclamation Options One of the trends that is sure to affect the portable sanitation industry is the move toward treating waste as a resource rather than a problem to be solved. The fact is that waste is full of valuable assets; we just need affordable technology to unlock it and monetize it. Over the next 20 years, portable sanitation companies that transition from dumping waste to harvesting its assets will become more and more common. It's already happening in some ways. For example: • As mentioned above, Northwest Cascade Honey Bucket uses dewatering to turn waste into a class A biosolid. Class A biosolid products such as composted biosolids, lime pasteurized biosolids, and fertilizer pellets can be used on home lawns and gardens, parks and golf courses, and other places. • Urine reclamation is getting a toe hold in some parts of the world. The nonprofit Rich Earth Institute in Vermont is leading the charge in the US, and the PSAI is involved in the development of resources and standards to help this fledgling option grow. Companies have experimented with portable toilet designs that divert the waste from urinals into a separate holding tank so that it does not contact the solid waste or deodorizer. Rich Earth then pasteurizes the urine and provides it to local farmers for fertilizer. For urine reclamation to be practical and scalable in the United States, standards and best practices are needed. At this time one issue is that most states don't have laws or regulations on the books that are conducive to large-scale urine reclamation and processing as a product. Another is that portable toilet units will need to be adjusted to divert the urine, and the challenge of collecting the urine will likely affect tank designs in the future. So this isn't a strategy that you can use right away unless you are in Vermont. Even so, we look for ideas like this are likely to be more common as waste disposal gets more costly and challenging. • If your company also collects fats, grease and oil (FOG), look at biodiesel production or some other method of harvesting the resources in these substances. In 2017 the PSAI visited Bahamas Waste on the island of Nassau. Due to the small size of the island, entrepreneurs there have to be creative in meeting their needs and dealing with waste. Franny de Cardenas, General Manager at Bahamas Waste, explained how their collection of FOG and biodiesel processing operation resulted in a fuel product they could use in their trucks. Continued on page 21 Bahamas Waste biodiesel operation on the island of Nassau.

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