Methods for faecal sludge analysis
Introduction
Faecal sludge management is recognized globally as an essential component of city-wide inclusive sanitation. However, a major gap in developing appropriate and adequate management and monitoring for faecal sludge is the ability to understand and predict the characteristics and volumes of accumulated faecal sludge, and correlations to source populations. Since standard methods for sampling and analysing faecal sludge do not currently exist, results are not comparable, the actual variability is not yet fully understood, and the transfer of knowledge and data between different regions and institutions can be challenging and often arbitrary. Due to this lack of standard analytical methods for faecal sludge, methods from other fields, such as wastewater management, and soil and food science are frequently applied. However, these methods are not necessarily the most suitable for faecal sludge analysis, and have not been specifically adapted for this purpose. Characteristics of faecal sludge can be different than these other matrices by orders of magnitude. There is also a lack of standard methods for sampling, which is complicated by the difficult
