excreta. This project was called the Erdos Eco-Town Project in a town called Erdos in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China. It was a collaboration between the Dongsheng District government in Erdos and the Stockholm Environment Institute and aimed to save water and provide sanitation services in this drought-stricken and rapidly urbanizing area of northern China. For a variety of technical, social and institutional reasons, the UDDTs were removed after only a few years and the project failed to deliver in the area of nutrient recovery. This project is now well documented and has raised more awareness of the challenges and disadvantages of "urban ecosan". The Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA, is an NGO dedicated to reclaiming human urine as fertilizer. They have established the only community-scale urine nutrient reclamation program in the United States and are researching and developing treatment technologies to optimize the use of urine as fertilizer. SOIL in Haiti built what they call "ecosan toilets" (UDDTs) as part of the emergency relief effort following the 2010 Haiti earthquake. More than 20,000 Haitians are currently using SOIL ecological sanitation toilets and SOIL has produced over 400,000 liters of compost as a result. The compost is used for agricultural and reforestation projects. SOIL's composting process is effective in inactivating Ascaris eggs – an indicator for helminth eggs in general – in the excreta collected from the dry toilets within 16 weeks. The composting and monitoring methods used by SOIL in Haiti may serve as an example for other international settings. Sanitation First, an NGO in the UK is building ecosan facilities (UDDTs) in various parts of the developing world. They predominantly work in Tamil Nadu (India), where the Tamil Nadu State Government provides subsidies for their work. They have also constructed ecosan in other parts of rural India, Kenya and Sierra Leone. According to their website, 58,000 people worldwide are using their ecosan toilets in 2021. The NGO CREPA which was operating in the French-speaking West Africa region (now called WSA – Water and Sanitation in Africa) was very active in ecosan promotion from 2002 to 2010 with a strong focus on UDDTs coupled with reuse in agriculture, especially in Burkina Faso. References External links Sustainable Sanitation Alliance – a network that deals with sustainable sanitation, of which ecosan can be regarded as a sub-set Additional photos: Type in "ecosan" in the search field of