Ishinca Toilet Project Update
October 2007Toilet duty: Cleaning out the composting toilet in Peru's Ishinca Valley.
Adam French won a Zack Martin Breaking Barriers Grant in 2006 to build a composting toilet in the popular Ishinca Valley in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca. In 2007, he returned to the valley to see how the system was working.
“Oh shit,” I thought, all too aptly, as I swung open the door to the composting toilet I had helped construct during the summer of 2006 in the Ishinca Valley. The toilet itself was in fine condition, relatively clean and not too smelly, but I immediately saw that the collection barrel below the seat was over capacity. My worst fears had been realized: overflow!
Despite the mess at hand, I was relieved to find that the pilot project Ben Ditto and I had implemented with lots of local and international support was actually accomplishing many of its objectives. Obviously, plenty of people were using the facility and someone (I’m still not sure who, but if you’re reading this: thank you!) had changed the collection barrels as they filled. Roughly 800 pounds of human waste mixed with wood chips and organic material had been contained rather than introduced directly into the Ishinca watershed.
Unfortunately, due to insufficient maintenance (mostly a failure to occasionally stir the barrels’ contents, which is necessary for aeration and the promotion of the composting process), only some of this material was actively breaking down. Nevertheless, it was clear that composting was happening, which was encouraging given that one of the fundamental points of the project was to test whether composting could work at such high elevations. The overflow had resulted simply from all the available barrels being full, a problem attributable largely to a lack of follow-through on the part of Huascarán National Park, which suffers perennially from shortages of both staff and funding.
Ben and I had been aware that ongoing maintenance would be the crux of the project, and last summer we worked hard to build capacity and broad support for the effort among park staff, local villagers and tourism operators, as well as the community of recreational users. Despite many assurances and the best intentions, very little follow-through in the way of maintenance occurred from any of these groups, which emphasized our initial suspicion that work of this nature will require a level of attention best insured through a paid and clearly defined position.
Aware of this need, this summer I worked to establish a formal agreement with two young Ishinca Valley residents (both of whom helped build the facility in 2006) to exchange maintenance work for either pay or climbing gear and basic mountaineering instruction. Only time will tell whether this agreement will lead to better maintenance of the facility, but, in any case, it is a further step toward including the local population in potential solutions to the problem of contamination of their watersheds by human waste.
On a particularly optimistic note, at the end of this summer the toilet project was incorporated into the efforts of the Alpine Conservation Partnership, a collaboration between the American Alpine Club and the Mountain Institute with a focus on protecting and restoring the world’s premier alpine ecosystems. Focused in the Cordillera Blanca, the Peruvian component of the ACP is currently working to improve local livelihoods and environmental conditions through a combination of educational activities and conservation initiatives, such as pasture improvement at lower elevations to take grazing pressures off highland watersheds. As part of the ACP in Peru, the Ishinca toilet project will receive ongoing support in its efforts to test and refine a sanitation system that effectively addresses the difficult and widespread problem of human waste contamination of high-altitude environments.