A Conversation With SOIL Advisory Board Member: Kory Russel
World Toilet Day, celebrated each year on November 19th, is SOIL’s favorite holiday because it’s about inspiring action to tackle the global sanitation crisis with the goal of reaching the 3.5 billion people in the world still living without safely managed sanitation. Each day in Haiti, SOIL’s amazing team works to increase access to sanitation in the communities we serve in Cap-Haitien and we couldn’t do it without the guidance and support of the members of our Advisory Board, change-makers from around the globe who are committed to ensuring equitable access to basic human rights. We’re thankful to have this incredible group of individuals supporting SOIL.
To commemorate World Toilet Day, SOIL interviewed Kory Russel, a member of our advisory board and a true innovator in the sanitation sector. Kory’s life experiences from growing up in Oregon and Papua New Guinea, to his university studies and Peace Corps service has led him on a pathway to take thoughtful action to find ways to address seemingly intractable challenges, specifically around sanitation. We were thrilled to speak with him to learn more about his deep knowledge and thoughts about Container Based Sanitation (CBS) and the sanitation sector.
Can you please tell us a little about yourself?
Following my time in the Peace Corps, I returned to study civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University where I helped to develop some of the earliest design iterations and research on container-based sanitation. In 2016, I joined the University of Oregon as an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Studies while working on a MS and PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. My current work focuses on the design, implementation, and experience of non-networked water and sanitation services specifically in resource constrained locations around the world. I also helped found the Container-Based Sanitation Alliance (cbs.global) in 2016 as well as the Landscape for Humanity initiative (www.landscape4humanity.org) in 2019. I am currently the Chair of the CBSA.
How did you get involved in the sanitation sector? What motivates you to stay involved?
While working in the Peace Corps I came to the realization that all the development goals that countries are striving for are downstream from water and sanitation. Without water and sanitation, health, education, and economic security are very difficult to achieve. Following this realization, I went back to school to study the issues of water and sanitation. I am motivated to stay involved because it is such a fundamental need and issue of justice for all of humanity and the non-human ecosystems that we rely on. Beyond the simple need, it is also a massive and complicated problem that is fascinating to engage with.
How did you get connected to SOIL/ Haiti?
Back in 2010, along with Sebastien Tilmans and Katherine Steele at Stanford University, we wrote a grant application to the Gates Foundation. We ended up being awarded a Global Grand Challenges Grant and it just so happened that Sasha was speaking at Stanford a couple weeks later. Given SOIL’s history with developing container-based sanitation style services it seemed like a really good match and Sebastien and I started coming down to Haiti on a regular basis to develop a pilot study of what we would later call container-based sanitation. The collaboration with SOIL was really a group effort and led to the publication of two of the foundational papers on CBS. SOIL has since taken that work and expanded, researched, and molded it into something we could have only dreamed of back in the early days. As a professor I have continued to have students who have engaged with SOIL for their academic work including most recently Froggi VanRiper who completed her PhD work studying the retention rate of SOIL customers.
What is the impact that you see SOIL is having and why do you feel that it is important?
SOIL is implementing safely managed sanitation in some of the most difficult conditions anywhere in the world. That in my opinion makes SOIL’s work super important, it demonstrates that sanitation can be delivered even under the harshest of conditions. Additionally, SOIL is engaged in a wide variety of research that has shown and continues to show how to safely manage sanitation in a cost effective and desirable manner.
World Toilet Day was last month and we would like to share with our broader audience why sanitation is so important. Is there anything in particular that really highlights the importance of sanitation that you could share?
For people? Sanitation is such an important foundation for public health. It is essential for reducing the spread of diarrheal diseases, typhoid, and cholera just to name a few. But beyond that it is so important for basic human dignity. Having a safe private place to perform our most intimate of necessities is essential for everyone.
For the environment? Untreated human waste being released into the environment leads to all sorts of damage. Particularly, human waste is high in nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous. When these high levels of nutrients are introduced to water bodies they produce eutrophication. The resulting explosion of algal growth ultimately sucks the oxygen out of the water and produces dead zones, which damage the livelihoods of local fisherman. Additionally, the contaminated waters can contaminate food supplies and present a danger to anyone who enters the waters. When you consider that roughly 80% of human waste goes untreated into the environment it is really a shocking statistic. The need for safely managed sanitation is immense.
For Haiti in particular? For Haiti, all the realities of not having sanitation outlined above are present. Given the tumultuous conditions of the last several years and currently within Haiti, the need for safely managed sanitation is essential. The introduction of cholera following the 2010 earthquake has made the need for sanitation even more pressing as the consequences of cholera outbreaks have been and continue to be devastating.
What are your thoughts on measuring the public health impacts of sanitation? Is the sanitation sector forever attached to only WASH impacts?
There has been a real attachment in the WASH sector, especially from funders, to quantify health impacts. I find this to be rather disappointing. The reality is there are numerous infectious pathways that are difficult to isolate in resource constrained communities. As a result, many logistically difficult and costly studies tend to show little or no significant health impacts from sanitation. However, we know from numerous historical studies that safely managed water and sanitation do have significant impacts on a community’s health. What is important to determine is whether a sanitation service/system is safely managed or not. For example, in many locations pit latrine waste is emptied into nearby waterways, thus negating the health benefits of access to sanitation. However, many funding sources still want numbers of lives saved or illness averted, when looking at the quantity of waste safely managed is a much more important indicator.
Where do you hope to see Container Based Sanitation in the next ten years?
This is a question that my dissertation committee asked me repeatedly, and I had no good answer then, I still feel that my answer is largely theoretical. However, I think if we look conservatively at where we are with informal settlements currently (>1 billion people) and where we are headed by 2050 (>3 billion people), at just 10% of that number we are looking at 100 to 300 million people using CBS over the next 20 years. That number could easily reach over a billion if governments get serious about providing safely managed sanitation around the globe.
What are CBS’s limits? From a technical standpoint, there is not really a limit to where CBS can be deployed outside of extreme space limitations. In any larger city you will need solid waste collection and CBS can fit right into that system. The limit comes much more from cultural and behavioral norms than from logistical limits. Not everyone wants CBS for reasons that may have nothing to do with the system itself aside from that it is not waterborne sanitation. There is a tremendous value and aspirational appeal to water-based sanitation despite its drawbacks from an environmental and cost standpoint. Ultimately, CBS needs to be as easy, comfortable, and frankly delightful as water-born sewerage if it is to gain mass adoption.
What are its strengths? CBS can really be deployed almost anywhere, and it is incredibly flexible. As communities change or the environmental conditions change, CBS can be modified to fit that new status quo. CBS require little or no water, which in our rapidly changing climatic situation is essential. Additionally, research has shown that once you reach a certain scale, CBS is one of the most cost-effective forms of sanitation delivery. Lastly, CBS does not lock a community into a specific type of sanitation, if in the future a government or community wants to switch to water-born sewerage they can do so very rapidly without a large sunk cost in CBS.
Where can people go to learn more about sanitation and/ or CBS?
At this year’s Architectural Biennale in Venice, Italy, I was fortunate to collaborate with graduate students Bjørn Kristensen and Audrey Rycewicz to create a piece entitled “Designing for the Intimate Shared Reality of All Species.” While the Biennale has official closed you can still learn more about the exhibit and CBS at the following link: https://www.koryrussel.com/venicebiennaleexhibition
Three books I recommend for those who are interested in sanitation are:
1) The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters – Rose George
2) Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet - Chelsea Wald
3) The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World - Steven Johnson
All three of these books are great reads and will give you a good foundation in the world of sanitation without being overly technical or dry. If you want information on CBS, I highly recommend checking out the Container-Based Sanitation Alliances (CBSA) resources page which has links to numerous CBS papers, blogs, and books. https://cbsa.global/resources
Thank you to Kory for his time in sharing more about CBS and his work and his never-ending curiosity and advocacy for our planet and its people.