Established by EcoSanRes-2, SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute, Sweden), China Node for Sustainable Sanitation(CNSS), is the first node among eight in the world, as well as one of three in Asia (Philippines, Nepal and China). CNSS includes core experts and a node expert pool comprising some 100 expert volunteers and accepts the guidance of the steering committee, supported and operated by two organizations, namely CSES (Centre of Sustainable Environmental Sanitation) and CWA (Clean Water Alliance).The node office is located at the University of Science and Technology in Beijing (USTB) in TuMu Lou building, Room1214.
As is known to all, China is a country lack of water resource, where there are more than two-thirds of its cities facing water crisis either for resource or quality, and furthermore 110 cities suffer from severe water shortages. Traditional draining mode not only needs high investment but also has difficulty in nutrition recycling in the water. A person consumes about 15000 liters of clean water to flush 50 liters of excrements and 500 liters of urine each year, which adds more pressure on China's water supply. Reclamation of wastewater and recovery of nutrients and energy from wastes are the best way to keep development sustainable.
Combining the goal of "reducing by half the proportion of the population without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation until the year 2015", one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is issued by the UN.It just refers that under the circumstance of building an environmental-friendly and resources-economy society with socialism featuring Chinese characteristics, and at the same time on the basis of history and the current lagged-behind situation of China's ecological sanitation, it is imperative to improve living environment in rural area and to build a water-saving urban drainage system with source-recovery oriented objectives. Therefore, CNSS has been established to provide a platform for knowledge exchange and capacity building of ecological sanitation in China and neighbor countries.
The responsibilities of CNSS are transfering sanitation concept, promoting the technology application of ecological sanitation, improving people's living condition and so on. Ecological sanitation is a concept aiming at making up the defect of traditional drainage and it is also a sustainable new mode for water resource management.
An Ecological Sanitation system, by the way of using low water consumption or no water consumption toilet like vacuum toilet,urine diverting toilet and dry toilet, reduces water use,achieves wastewater separation at source and applies related technology to the following treatment of excrements and to the reuse of energy material, thus avoiding the high cost for long-distance transportation and the mix-up of wastewater from different sources. In China, in the movement of Building New Villages, some families have been using agricultural waste to produce biogas as fuel and projects like "4 in 1 biogas" have been applied already some decades ago.
CNSS, always commits itself to the research and the promotion of the technology of sustainable sanitation, has organized and participated in many international or domestic communication gatherings in various patterns like meetings, seminars, training courses and so on, setting up example projects of ecological sanitation, translating relevant books of that, doing researches on that and launching exchange channels through a website, a platform for accessible communication to promote the idea, thus in China, the concept of ecological sanitation could be widely disseminated, the technology of that be further developed and more cooperation opportunities might be created.
Alone, the objective vision of CNSS can never be reached. Therefore, we give warm welcome to all kinds of organizations, departments, enterprises etc. along with us, to promote the concept of the technology of ecological sanitation. With the help of the platform of node, to do the scientific research and push the development and application of that technology; meanwhile, with close cooperation its possible to expand the application range of that technology in China and explore new space for it. We also hope experts give us their valuable advice on the node construction. With the extensive cooperation and support of national strategy and new technology development, we will devote ourselves to the construction of an environmental friendly, a resources-economy society, and to the environmental improvement of domestic and global sanitation.