What Is It About Toilets?

Why is it so hard to build toilets? Do an Internet search and you will find hundreds of sites on the topic. Organizations, like the International Reference Centre for Waste Disposal, the World Bank, and the United Nations Development Program have published enough technical papers on excreta disposal to fill a library. Conferences are a dime a dozen. Experts abound. Still, we cannot get it right.

Part of the problem is the lumping together of water and sanitation. It makes sense that the two topics are said in the same breath, as the quality of one hinges on the other. But water always steals the show. It is sexier. No talk of feces or urine or odors or cultural preferences for wiping. Delivering the product -- water -- is all science and no art. Measuring success in its delivery is straight forward. You see water when the spigot is turned on. Sanitation, on the other hand, is about toilets (by toilets, I mean the containment / treatment system too). You can throw hand-washing and hygiene in there, but it is essentially about keeping excreta out -- particularly feces and the pathogens that they can carry -- of people's bellies.

It is a serious problem. The United Nations Development Program has declared that 3.3 billion people still lack "proper sanitation." 'Proper' here means a reduced risk of immediate disease. Keeping what comes out of our bodies out of our stomachs: either via drinking water, food, from our hands, or flies. People get sick, some die, especially young children, from lack of proper sanitation. People also have to contend with the indignity of public defecation. Women that live in households without toilets, for instance in parts of Egypt, do not urinate until sunset, for fear of being seen. Urinary track infections are rampant. So is dehydration because women do not drink fluids during the day. Little girls in schools without toilets have no place to urinate, so hold it in until they get home or find a private place -- if they can make it that far. I've seen girls crying when the school bell rang in the little town in which I lived in Nicaragua.

The 3.3 billion figure is higher than the numbers at the end of the UN declared International Water and Sanitation Decade (1980 - 1990). Access to safe drinking water improved. Funding for urban sanitation skyrocketed, according to Frank Hartvelt, Deputy Director of the Science and Technology Private Sector Division of the UNDP, with "80% of all the investments going to well-off urban areas, for expensive installations." Rural sanitation remained the forgotten step-child.

The lessons learned by the development sector after the 10 year focus on water and sanitation are directed at doing things at the local level and evolving a "demand-based" approach to delivering services, meaning people should get what they want and pay for what they get. A good idea until you see the paltry selection of technologies available to choose from and the pennies in the piggy banks available to pay for them.

Technical innovation is vital. Here we find the Achilles heal of sanitation. Make it too simple, and everyone becomes a self-described expert yet no one has expertise. Make it complex, and the engineering firms step in, spending dollars by the millions to move the problem downstream and out of sight (primarily by building sewers). I can see the fingers wagging. Technology is not everything. Indeed it is not. But if you want people to desire something, whether it is a television set or a toilet, you had better make it attractive and make it work. The gleaming white porcelain toilet stool in the indoor bathroom, washing away waste with one rumble of a five gallon flush, is attractive and it works in that it gets rid of the objectionable material. But to get rid of anything in this world is an oxymoron. For example, the 26 or so million pounds of sludge produced from US wastewater treatment plants and the 26 billion gallons a day of wastewater released into lakes, rivers, and oceans by these treatment plants do not "go away."

We know what works, if "working" is defined from a health, ecological, and user-based stand point. The toilet system chosen should break the disease cycle and be free of toxins, industrial or otherwise. It should be environmentally benign at worst and beneficial at best. And people have to want it -- want it in their homes, want to use it, and agree to pay for part or all of it. Not many technologies fit the bill. Compromises are bound to be made. But if we recognize the composting toilet as a technology that meets this criteria, why is it that so few are out there and so few people can build one that works?

The toilet is not an isolated technology like the water spigot. It is relatively simple to make, much like a computer is relatively simple to repair. Once you get the knack for it, the devil is in the details. Where it is located, how it is integrated into the living space, and what it looks like are as important as making it watertight, giving it ventilation, and properly sizing it. What happens inside the composting toilet is not magic. It is a bio-chemical process that can be moved along or impeded by some simple maintenance or lack thereof. Understanding the decomposition process of the materials that go into the composting tank, namely feces and urine, is a fundamental building block to the composting toilet designer's acumen. Caring about what comes out at the end of the treatment process, namely humus and urine converted to its nitrate and nitrite components, is fundamental to having a good composting toilet and fundamentally defines the toilet.

Do-it-yourselfers, or auto-construction in the parlance of the development sector, are important tendrils on the branch of on-site toilet systems, but scaling-up the technologies and developing an industry that understands how to define good systems, how to get them into people's homes, how to get people to want them, and how to keep them working requires building an infrastructure we currently do not have.

The new infrastructure consists of people approaching toilet building from a health, ecological, and user-based orientation; access to technologies that "work"; financing -- both private and public -- to develop production and marketing capabilities; financial packages that help people pay for the toilets; and government policies that punish polluters, reward ecological innovators, and promote demand-driven entrepreneurial initiatives in the sanitation sector.

It is about getting people out there to economically and efficiently deliver the toilet you want and getting you to want the toilet that the environment needs. 3.3 billion people are waiting.

Laura Orlando

ReSource Musings Archive