URBWAT

URBWAT seeks to implement grey-water treatment constructed wetlands within a modern, urban, mega-city slum context. Grey water in such a context is very different to that emanating from a developed urban environment. The project is located Alexandra, a township which includes formal, semi-formal and informal settlements, immediately adjacent to Sandton, the economic centre of Africa. The project draws on social science, psychology, biology, chemistry and engineering skills to understand the specific context with a view to designing, building, implementing and monitoring a grey-water treatment system which will exceed the lifespan of the funding. There is a strong focus on understanding and hopefully overcoming the human drivers leading to failure of treatment systems in similar contexts in other parts of the world.

The project has a number of expected outputs: 

a) This project will design, build, commission and pilot a constructed wetland system which will be used by the members of the community on a daily basis. This would include real single household-sized constructed wetlands in the demonstration area to be used on a daily basis to treat grey water. We would also construct a demonstration unit at Frankenwald (50m north of the site on land currently owned by Wits University if permission is granted) to show to and involve the community; 

b) The project will engage with and train the community on the use of the system, as well as provide education to the community about the risks and dangers of poor sanitation;

 c) The development of a website with a video/photo-log for project dissemination purposes. 

d) The project will train at least 2 African PhD students (or equivalent), to be registered at the University of the Witwatersrand, and one post-doctoral researcher in Leipzig. Additionally, the project will be used for undergraduate and postgraduate field demonstrations of greywater treatment systems within an African urban shanty environment; 

e) We believe that a significant number of peer-reviewed research papers will be produced through supporting this project. We anticipate that this could potentially include: 

i) A social sciences paper, most likely in psychology detailing pre- and post implementation attitudes;
ii) Science papers describing the Langrug system, the chemistry of urban slum grey water, the biological, chemical and hydraulic processes within the system(s), results from the usage of different support matrices within the CW and a full summary of the system, including flow and kinetic models for planning and visualisation; 
iii) Design and assessment tools to construct and monitor the treatment efficiency of household size constructed wetlands in townships; and 

f) The transfer and mobilisation of researchers from each location to travel to, spend time at and interact with researchers at the other locations. We will seek additional funding (from for example the BMBF, DAAD, FORMAS, STINT, WRC, NRF and others) to co-fund these exchanges as far as possible.