For a hundred years the solution was always the same: lay more pipes, build a bigger wastewater plant, pray it all behaves. On drawings it looks fantastic. On the ground it leaks, breaks and dumps waste into rivers and oceans every single day.

Most wastewater plants in developing regions are already overwhelmed. Flows come in higher than the design ever allowed. Pumps scream. Aeration can’t keep up. Sludge piles up. The biology collapses. Operators fight fires while the load keeps rising.

Then comes the knockout punch. A truck dumps a load from chemical toilets. The chemicals kill the microbes that actually do the treatment. The whole plant crashes. Raw sewage pours straight into rivers, wetlands and the ocean. Fish die. Corals choke under nutrients. And communities downstream pay for a system that ran out of road years ago.

And this is not a ‘South Africa only’ story.

Globally about 80% of wastewater entering the ocean is completely untreated. The remaining 20% still carries valuable nutrients that fuel algal blooms instead of feeding soils.

Container based sanitation

This is exactly why container based sanitation (CBS) is growing fast. It doesn’t depend on a perfect grid, a perfect operator or a perfect stormwater season. It doesn’t collapse when a pump station floods. It doesn’t send shock loads into fragile plants. It’s sealed, predictable and beautifully boring.

It works like waste collection. You keep the waste contained. You swap the container before anything goes wrong. You treat it safely and get the same result every time. Wastewater plants haven’t delivered that kind of reliability for decades. CBS is now one of the fastest-growing parts of sanitation. Faster than solar. Faster than most WASH tech. The Container Based South Africa Report (CBSA) says it clearly:

‘CBS works in the real world where things break, not in the fantasy world where everything works.’

And CBS isn’t here to fight advanced WESS systems. It supports them. WESS is brilliant where it fits, but it is expensive and slow to roll out.

CBS fills the huge gaps pipes can’t reach. Rural schools. Flood zones. Clinics. Coastal communities. Informal settlements where infrastructure dreams go to die. What governments actually need is reliability. Predictable service. Standard treatment every time. No surprise failures. No nutrient pollution when the power cuts. No chemical shock that wipes out a whole plant. Just clean toilets, safe treatment and no drama.

This is how we protect ecosystems. This is how we keep fish alive and stop corals from suffocating under the nutrient soup leaking from broken infrastructure. Sanitation isn’t a construction competition. It’s a service. And CBS is the upgrade we need if we want healthy schools, clean rivers and oceans that stop drowning in human waste. Let´s fix this sh*t!

By Birger Lundgren, CEO and founder of Sanitation Ambassadors