Once a pit latrine is full, latrine owners in most places have little alternatives but to abandon their pit and dig a new one or to manually empty the latrine. Common mechanical methods for emptying of latrines in emergency and non-emergency settings have proven to be expensive and often dangerous. While some new manual techniques like the gulper and the trimmer have recently come on the market, there are currently few alternatives available in most settings from the common vacuum desludging trucks and manual emptying. The common vacuum sludge trucks do have a problem with sucking pit latrines, as the sludge is often thick and not really fluid. As part of the Emergency Sanitation Project (ESP) and the S(P)EEDKITS project, new desluding equipment was developed and modified for use in various contexts, including humanitarian emergencies.