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"The Bellagio statement though published in the year 2000, has not been given adequate prominence and is not very well known even now. It could be considered a lost opportunity that it did not get into the mainstream thinking on Sanitation of the Millennium Development goals.
A new opportunity has now arrived with the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, to understand and practice the principles of this Declaration through adoption of these sustainable approaches.
By these principles, mega sewerage and, end of pipeline treatment rank as most unsustainable technologies."
Eng Duleep Goonewardene
In the world today, 1.2 billion people are without access to safe drinking water, 3 billion are without proper sanitation and 50% of solid wastes remain uncollected. Meeting at Bellagio, Italy, from 1-4 February 2000, an expert group brought together by the Environmental Sanitation Working Group of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council agreed that current waste management policies and practices are abusive to human well-being, economically unaffordable and environmentally unsustainable. They therefore called for a radical overhaul of conventional policies and practices world-wide, and of the assumptions on which they are based, in order to accelerate progress towards the objective of universal access to safe environmental sanitation, within a framework of water and environmental security and respect for the economic value of wastes
The principles governing the new approach are as follows: .
1. Human dignity, quality of life and environmental security should be at the centre of the new approach, which should be responsive and accountable to needs and demands in the local setting.
- Solutions should be tailored to the full spectrum of social, economic, health and environmental concerns
- The household and community environment should be protected
- The economic opportunities of waste recovery and use should be harnessed
2. In line with good governance principles, decision-making should involve participation of all stakeholders, especially the consumers and providers of services.
- Decision-making at all levels should be based on informed choices
- Incentives for provision and consumption of services and facilities should be consistent with the overall goal and objective
- Rights of consumers and providers should be balanced by responsibilities to the wider human community and environment
3. Waste should be considered a resource, and its management should be holistic and form part of integrated water resources, nutrient flows and waste management processes.
- Inputs should be reduced so as to promote efficiency and water and environmental security
- Exports of waste should be minimized to promote efficiency and reduce the spread of pollution
- Wastewater should be recycled and added to the water budget
4. The domain in which environmental sanitation problems are resolved should be kept to the minimum practicable size (household, community, town, district, catchment, city) and wastes diluted as little as possible.
- Waste should be managed as close as possible to its source
- Water should be minimally used to transport waste
- Additional technologies for waste sanitation and reuse should be developed
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