When eThekwini Municipality was established in 1999, over 60 000 Ventilated Improved Pit (VIP) latrines were inherited from the incorporated local entities. In 2009, the municipality set out to empty over 35 000 VIP latrines, which were already full. One of the challenges from this operation was the disposal of the faecal sludge that had accumulated in the latrines in an environmentally safe way. The initial idea was to dispose of the sludge in wastewater treatment plants but this caused overloading of the treatment plants. Consequently, the municipality had to seek an alternative solution to manage faecal sludges. This led to the concept of the LAtrine DEhydration and PAsteurisation (LaDePa) machine, manufactured by Particle Separation System (PSS). The machine was manufactured and used to process the collected faecal sludge from pit latrines and process it into dried and pasteurised pellets, which can be used as a soil conditioner or fertiliser, or which could be combusted as a fuel.The LaDePa process involves pellet pasteurisation and drying through the combination of convective and Medium Infrared Radiation (MIR) heating. The heat pasteurises the faecal sludge by destroying the vital structure of microorganisms, viruses and parasites, and leads to the evaporation of the moisture. Infrared drying has been widely used in several industrial sectors [1]: pulp and paper industry, textile industry, minerals drying, polymer solutions, and food industry. It is well known that infrared drying is a more efficient than convective methods because of a more depth penetration of the heat within the solid. Better results were obtained with medium infrared emitters than low or high infrared emitters due to a higher heat absorption in that wavelength range [2,3]. The LaDePa machine is located in the Tongaat wastewater treatment plan, 37 km north of Durban.Figure 1 and Figure 2 show photographs of the side views (front and back) of LaDePa, respectively.This process comprises an extrusion section and a drying and pasteurisation section. A diesel generator provides the electricity and heating necessary for processing the VIP sludge. The faecal sludge that is emptied from the VIP latrines is transported to site and stored in open air until LaDePa processing.