Sustainable tourism practices for water treatment and solid waste management in tourist lodges in Talamanca

Abstract

This initiative of research and extension was born from a presentation of the project entitled Combined water collection, waste treatment, and anaerobic digestion energy provision system for ecotourism in rural Costa Rica. The project was awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency of the E.E.U.U. at the Sustainable Design Expo 2015 in Alexandria, Virginia, United States. The objective of the project was to integrate technologies that promotes the use of sustainable practices to solve problems of access to drinking water and poor management of solid and liquid wastes that some tourist shelters have in the Bribri indigenous territory, Costa Rica. The work was carried out under the Participatory Action Research (PAR). The main outcomes of the project were: 1) a tourist lodge with an integrated pilot system of water purification and solid and liquid waste treatment combining technologies such as filtration, anaerobic digestion and constructed wetlands, and 2) an environmental education and awareness-raising strategy in tourist lodges and educational centers, with a focus on solid waste management, food security and climate change.