Despite decades of investment in widening access to improved sanitation, much of the world still lacks access to functional sanitation facilities. Through much of the Global South, toilets are inoperable and often abandoned. Failure to understand and account for the whole-life cost of sanitation infrastructure, as well as the interplay between context-specific socio-economic determinants, is one explanation for this reduction in the service life of shared sanitation infrastructure. This issue is especially salient in school-based and communal facilities in middle- to low-income countries. Drawing on a case study of a sanitation facility in a government school in rural south India, we explore the relationship between user value, community-based capacity, and external support in determining the costs of operating and maintaining sanitation facilities over their lifetime. We develop a scenario-based life-cycle cost assessment methodology to examine the relational impact of these determinants on the ‘real’ cost of shared sanitation infrastructure. The analysis concludes that investment and interventions that stimulate demand and enhance the capacity of a community are the most cost-effective options for ensuring the sustainability of sanitation facilities in our case study site. We then reflect on the applicability and limitations of these findings for a wider range of communal sanitation facilities.

Healthy peatlands provide valuable ecosystem services. Peat extraction damages peatlands, leading to carbon emissions. One of the main reasons for peat extraction is for use in horticulture. Replacing peat with recycled organic materials in horticulture is critical to preserve the valuable ecosystems provided by peatlands and to establish more circular supply chains that are reliant on recycling rather than extraction. Despite the strong policy commitment and budget allocation to restore peatlands, the demand for peat-based growing media remains high and drives most of the peat demand. In our research, we mapped the growing media supply chain, held semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders representing different interests, and surveyed amateur gardeners in the UK to understand the bottlenecks experienced by each profile in ending peat use and how to overcome them. We employed semi-structured key expert surveys to understand the supply chain dynamics and consumer demand, informed by these early interviews and the previous literature, we prepared and distributed an online consumer survey and interviewed supply-side stakeholders to understand their perspectives. The findings indicate that the barriers of availability, cost, and performance are shared between the supply-and-demand-side stakeholders. A portfolio of financial, educational and logistic interventions is required to simultaneously support the supply side to accelerate the transformation of production and supply patterns and to aid the demand side to adapt to growing with compost of recycled organic materials. The policies promoting recycled organic material use in horticulture must be coordinated within the UK and with other parts of Europe focusing on the elimination of the peat content in products rather than peat extraction to avoid extraction and the associated destruction of peat stocks elsewhere.