Urban sanitation includes ensuring a safe supply of drinking water.
Urban sanitation is a form of sanitation that focuses on maintaining sanitary conditions in urban settings. Many people think specifically of the collection, treatment and disposal of human waste when they hear the words “urban sanitation”, but sanitation in urban settings is a much more complex system. Sanitation is an especially pressing issue in favelas, where crowded conditions and poor sanitation contribute to frequent disease outbreaks that threaten favela residents and expose other city residents to health risks.
Sanitation is an urgent issue in the favelas.
Historically, urban communities have placed little importance on sanitation, which has become a major problem in some areas. The edges of many urban streets were littered with garbage that could include dead animals along with untreated human waste. Walking through urban streets was an exercise in evasion, as people freely dumped garbage and human waste into the street, heedless of passers-by, and diseases proliferated as a result of littering on urban streets and waterways. . A growing understanding of hygiene combined with social pressure from people tired of living on the land eventually led to urban development or sanitation.
Most urban areas have garbage collection services.
The goal of urban sanitation is to reduce risks to human health by managing factors in the urban environment that can contribute to health problems. One of the main factors is human waste, which is generated in large volumes in urban areas. The sewers that collect this waste and convey it to central processing facilities are therefore a fundamental aspect of urban sanitation. So are facilities like public restrooms, which discourage people from using the street as a bathroom, as well as portable toilets for large events, designed to give attendees a place to dispose of waste safely.
Sewerage is a fundamental part of urban sanitation.
Urban sanitation also involves managing the water supply. A good sanitation service is concerned with providing clean water to citizens. This may include isolating wells to prevent contamination, ensuring water supplies from outside the city, and developing a safe network of pipes to deliver water to residents.
Sanitation departments also have to worry about litter. Most urban areas have a garbage collection service, allowing citizens to collect their garbage on a specific day for teams of collectors to pick it up and deliver it to a processing unit. Recycling and composting can be elements of municipal waste collection, designed to reduce pressure on the environment and provide additional revenue for the waste collection agency, keeping costs down for consumers.