A/68/264 faecal sludge and septage lag far behind, although they offer huge health and environmental benefits at much lower costs than sewer networks. 32. During her country missions, the Special Rapporteur has constantly witnessed challenges in the operation and management of septic tanks and the disposal of septage, giving rise to severe challenges for the realization of human rights. 19 On-site sanitation solutions have been promoted as a way for people to quickly “gain access to sanitation” without giving due regard to what happens when pits fill up. Often, tanks are not properly maintained and pollutants leak into groundwater and environment, impairing the health of neighbouring residents or those depending on shallow aquifers. Once the tanks are full, they need to be emptied. This process of emptying, collection and transportation usually lacks regulation, control and accountability, resulting in contents being dumped by collection trucks relatively close by, into waterways or the larger environment, adjacent to locations where people live, farm, fish or work. Trucks serving a given municipality are often not sufficient to meet the demand. Moreover, poor households, in order to avoid periodically hiring unaffordable trucks, might divert the water overflowing from their tanks leading to continued exposure and health risks. 33. Another largely ignored area is the collection and management of greywater as well as stormwater. The latter frequently contains much higher levels of pollution than commonly assumed so that more efforts are needed to integrate stormwater into wastewater management. The associated challenges are exacerbated during times of flooding. The Constitutional Chamber of Costa Rica found that poorly maintained sewage systems, which contributed to the flooding of households with wastewater during periods of heavy rainfall, violated the right to health. 20 34. Where a sewer system does exist, treatment of wastewater does not necessarily take place before it is discharged into bodies of water. In some cases, only part of the sewer system may be connected to a wastewater treatment plant, whereas the rest is discharged into watercourses without treatment. Even when connected to a treatment plant, this does not always guarantee continuous and sufficient treatment (see A/HRC/12/24/Add.1, para. 73). The reasons for those failures are manifold, but they all boil down to the low priority afforded to wastewater management or to the advancement of solutions that are inappropriate in a given context. Treatment plants are often underdimensioned with far more connections to the sewer network than the capacity of the plants would allow for (see report on mission to Bangladesh, A/HRC/15/55, para. 58). In many instances, connections are ineffectively controlled and regulated, with illicit connections adding to the strain of the system (see A/HRC/12/24/Add.1, para. 73). Numerous anecdotes point to the construction of “white elephants”, large-scale projects that are not designed for local conditions characterized by a combination of inappropriate scale, inappropriate location, and/or inappropriate technology. 21 Such plants often fail to operate after short periods of time. In addition to such large-scale failures, decaying, outdated and dysfunctional __________________ 19 20 21 10/23 See reports on missions to: Egypt, A/HRC/15/31/Add.3, paras. 20, 41, 42, 52; Costa Rica, A/HRC/12/24/Add.1, para. 38; Uruguay, A/HRC/21/42/Add.2, para. 35; Kiribati, A/HRC/24/44/Add.1, 2013, paras. 30, 34; Tuvalu, A/HRC/24/44/Add.2, paras. 14, 26, 27; and Thailand, A/HRC/24/44/Add.3, paras. 45, 47. Decisions No. 11796 of 17 August 2007 and No. 17007 of 21 November 2007. Sick Water, p. 60. 13-41825