Sanitation Safety Plan

2.1 Overview
This section provides a description of the sanitation system of Sakhipur municipality. The system
description has been validated through field investigations and other secondary information
(published reports). Methods include sanitary inspection and surveillance, focus group
discussions, key informant interviews and collection of samples for laboratory testing.

The SSP considered the full sanitation chain from waste generation to reuse or disposal within
the municipality. This includes the entire area of the municipality covered by different sanitation
systems, containment, collection, treatment systems as well as downstream users of the
compost products from the treatment plant.

2.2 User interface

In Sakhipur, the maximum households are semi-well-built or poorly built (85.2%) having toilets
separated from the household structure (ITN-BUET, 2021). The widely used toilets in Sakhipur
is pucca/ring slab toilet made of ring slabs with one pit or two pits, followed by katcha toilet
made of ring-slab installed in earth. Majority of the poor and middle-class households install the
pucca/ring slab toilet. The well-off families adopt many variations according to their capacity
that include various types of pans and commodes. Almost 14.8% well-built superstructure
households have attached hygienic toilet with pan/commode inside the brick and concrete
superstructure (ITN-BUET, 2021).

2.3 Containment
The type of containment structure depends on the housing patterns and available spaces. As
more well-built brick structures and houses are found in wards 5 and 6, septic tanks connected
with the main structure are also more frequent there (Harun, 2016). Figure 2.1 shows an
overview of the sanitation containment technologies in Sakhipur municipality, where 81.0% of
households were using single pit (of which 60% is off-set pit), 9% were using septic tank, and
10% using twin-pit (ITN-BUET, 2021). However, currently, installation of septic tanks is on the
rise. Generally, septic tanks are used in institutions, community and public toilets while people
mostly construct fully lined tanks at household level. More than 79.0% of the septic tanks in the
households have two or more compartments. However, it was found that all the septic tanks
have length-width ratio less than the recommended length-width ratio (3:1) for septic tank design
(ITN-BUET, 2021).

Figure 2.1 also shows the discharge points of both tank and pit-based containment systems. It
shows that, maximum pit contents infiltrate into the soil layers (77.8%), except few cases of pit
overflow (16.6%) and direct connection to water body (5.6%). Among the septic tanks, 54.1%
are connected to soak pits. Apart from that, 4.2% septic tanks discharge wastewater into water
bodies, 29.2% do not know where the wastewater ends up and 12.5% septic tanks do not have
any outlet and causes overflows at times (ITN-BUET, 2021)

Description of the Sanitation System 12