Reinvented toilet (RT) developers must understand the competitive landscape of incumbent, small-scale sewage treatment plants (STPs) in India. Historically these developers have been challenged to access and interpret information on these systems because of difficulties
- Obtaining data for technologies at a relevant scale,
- Understanding configuration/set-up,
- Describing STPs using shared definitions and terminology,
- Understanding the effluent quality produced in order to compare performance, and
- Understanding capital and operating costs.
To address the developers’ needs, we worked with our in-country resources – suppliers, vendors, contractors, consultants, developers and building owners and end-users – to acquire information on decentralized, small-scale STPs; we concentrated on three system types:
- Moving Bed Biofilm Reactors,
- Sequencing Batch Reactors, and
- Membrane Bioreactors.
We created cost curves that show variations in capital and operating costs over a range of operating capacities.
From our research, we drafted the report “An Assessment of Smal-Scale STP Technologies: India” to ensure our partners understand configurations, features, performance, and cost of relevant small-scale systems and markets for STPs. Developers can use this information to position new RT designs to compete with existing and accepted technologies in India and to inform business decisions on taking RTs to market.