World sanitation goals slip; nature can help

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - "The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers," French 19th century author Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables. "The sewer is the conscience of the city ... A sewer is a cynic. It tells everything."

Judged by its sewers, the world is not doing well. Only 3 in 10 people now have a connection to a public sewerage system.

And with the world's population expanding, a goal of improving sanitation by 2015 is slipping out of reach, despite progress in nations such as China and a few big contracts for firms such as Veolia or Suez to build waste treatment plants in cities from La Paz to Rabat.

Experts say a part of the solution, especially to cut water-borne diseases for the rural poor, may lie in renewed and smarter exploitation of nature -- for example through plants or soil bacteria that feed on waste.

Novel schemes include a plan to build an artificial wetland at a jail in Mombasa, Kenya, to process sewage from 4,000 inmates that now flows untreated into a creek, or ponds in South Africa where algae purify waste and are then used as fertilizer.

"About 90 percent of the sewage and 70 percent of the industrial waste in developing countries are being discharged untreated into water courses," said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP).

"Understanding the ability of peatlands, of marshes, of wetlands, to play an integral part in filtering ... waste water is often overlooked," he said.

The U.N. set a millennium goal of halving the proportion of people with no access to sanitation -- even simple latrines rather than sewers -- by 2015 from 40 percent of humanity or 2.6 billion people now: "Africa is probably struggling the most," Steiner said.