About

The Perspective Business Development in Resource Recovery and Safe Reuse (“Perspective RRR Business Development”) is the central resource platform for all educational and training material developed under the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) funded collaborative Resource Recovery and Safe Reuse (RRR) Project. It is the learning platform for future entrepreneurs who plan to start a business with a resource recovery and reuse from liquid and solid waste streams focus.

The overall goal of the RRR-Project is to support large-scale implementation of resource recovery models from liquid and solid waste streams in Africa (see also STEP Africa), Asia and Latin America (see also STEP Gestión de Agua y Saneamiento Sostenible en América Latina) to promote food and energy security, cost recovery in the water, sanitation and resource management sector, and livelihood opportunities, while safeguarding human and environmental health in urban and peri-urban areas of low- and middle-income countries. This translates into the following two key objectives:

1. To increase the scale and viability of productive reuse of water, nutrients, organic matter and energy from domestic and agro-industrial waste streams through the analysis, promotion and implementation of economically viable business models.
2. To safeguard public health in the context of rapidly expanding use of wastewater, excreta and greywater in agriculture and aquaculture and protect vulnerable groups from specific health risks associated with this pattern of agricultural development.

• A catalogue of generic RRR Business Models for safe resource recovery and reuse
• A Sanitation Safety Plan (SSP) manual to operationalise the WHO Guideline for Safe Use of Wastewater, Excreta and Greywater (2006)
• Educational and training materials on RRR business models and SSPs

The recovery of water, nutrients and energy is a very high priority, as half the world’s population is predicted to live in water stressed areas by 2025, and agricultural resources are also being depleted. This scenario is further aggravated by the frequently inadequate management of liquid and solid wastes in urban and peri-urban areas of low- and middle-income countries, which leads to the untreated disposal of waste streams, and associated subsequent human and environmental health risks. The emerging resource-oriented private sector is creating innovative RRR Business Models: examples of resource recovery include biogas production, aquaculture (see also aquaculture (animals) and aquaculture (plants)), urine markets, compost-blending and sludge fertilization. Identifying promising business cases and assessing their feasibility in large-scale scenarios holds the potential to scale-up the productive use of waste resources, and provide for improved human and environmental health.

Partners of the Perspective RRR Business Development

Content overview of the Perspective RRR Business Development