Because the subject of sanitation is sometimes unclear, both in terms of its scope and its impact on people’s lives, some clarification is required.

Domestic sanitation consists in evacuating then processing all our domestic waste, both solid (household waste) and liquid (wastewater).
In our societies, the domestic sanitation cycle of wastewater contains three stages:

• Evacuation of wastewater (toilets, kitchen, bath-room),
• Transportation via a network of pipes and pump stations to treatment plants or lagoons
• Treatment of these waters before discharging them in a natural milieu and elimination of the sludge produced through clarification of wastewaters.

This cycle is especially valid in densely populated towns and villages. In less populated areas, the sanitation system is individual and often contains a septic tank followed by subterranean water spreading.
However this scheme is far from being the norm everywhere. In several world regions, what is known as the sanitation crisis starts with lack of access to toilets -the first fundamental stage of the sanitation cycle.

Lack of access to toilets forces people to resort to “traditional” habits (defecating out in the open, in plastic bags, close to houses or water points), generating serious sanitary risks.
Excreta – reservoirs of pathogenic germs - can be found all over the environment; it can directly contaminate various milieu such as water sources, by dilution or infiltration, making such water useless for human consumption; it can also contaminate food or water via transmission vectors (flies, children).
Consumption of water or food contaminated by excreta kills over 1,8 million people a year, of which 90% are children under five.
The risk of transmission of waterborne diseases is therefore very high where there is a deficiency of adequate sanitation facilities, leading to numerous repercussions on the local environment.

Access to toilets is not a “luxury”, especially for the 2.6 billion people without it(close to 40 times the population of France)!
These people are deprived of access to basic sanitation, e.g. latrines (dry toilets). If the benchmark is the developing countries model (flush toilets served by a continuous supply of water, with human waste channeled by pipes into a sewerage system or septic tank and treatment facilities), 4 billion people do not have an adequate sanitation system (Source: Human Development report, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2006). The Water Coalition, of which Triangle GH is a member, has decided to focus its efforts on raising awareness about this first stage through the exhibition: “Sanitation is Dignity” (10-11-12 November, Place Bellecour, Lyons, France). Indeed, if the Western world can afford to explore complex issues such as evacuation and treatment, a major part of the world’s population is still lacking basic toilet facilities. As long as this basic need is not covered, further issues make no sense.