November 19th marked World Toilet Day, an international day of action to break the toilet taboo and draw attention to the global sanitation challenge. Everyone poops, but sanitation is not a sexy issue and is taboo to talk about in a lot of contexts. If it does come up in conversation, it is usually with the same awkward unwieldiness that is associated with other unmentionable and uncomfortable conversation topics, like embarrassing sex noises.
In the spirit of toilet day and because I relish discussing taboos, this post is dedicated to shedding some light on the global poop problem and some of the incredible work happening to mitigate it.
If you’re reading this, chances are that you flush your poo, but globally most poop does not get flushed. The western flush toilet was invented more than 200 years ago, in 1775. Today, despite astounding technological advances, the flush toilet has remained relatively unchanged. On average, it takes 3.5 gallons of water per toilet per flush. If the world’s seven billion people all pooped once a day in a flushable toilet and operated by the “if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down” rule there would be 24.5 billion gallons flushed each day. The world’s water supply simply can’t handle that volume of flushing toilets.
Given that the world’s population continues to increase, flush toilets aren’t the sustainable solution. Yet, across the globe, 2.6 billion people don’t have access to sanitation services. That is 40 percent of the world population. One billion of those people with zero access to toilets defecate in the open. In rural areas of developing nations, one in three people have no alternative to open defecation, which means that more than 200 million tons of human waste goes untreated each year. That’s enough untreated feces to fill close to 400 oil tankers.
In the developing world, 90 percent of sewage goes directly into lakes, rivers, and oceans. In developed countries, cities depend on old, rickety sewage systems that are easily overwhelmed by a heavy rain. All of this untreated sewage adds up to a major public health crisis that kills about 1.4 million children each year, which is roughly one child in every 20 seconds. As a reference point, that comes out to be more than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.
On World Toilet Day, people come together in solidarity to show that they give a shit about sanitation and raise awareness of the problem, but it is only the tip of the iceberg of exciting things happening in the world of sanitation solutions. In 2011, the United Nations pledged to cut the number of people without toilet access in half, a goal it has said it will be unable to meet. Bill Gates rose to that challenge and is offering $42 million in funding towards reinventing the toilet. The requirement of the toilet of the future is that it must be operable without electricity, plumbed water, or a sewer system. The toilet must also be easy to install and cost five cents or less per user daily to build and maintain.
Across the globe, teams are working to develop innovative solutions. The Dutch are testing to see if they can use microwaves to turn waste into carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which become fuel stacks to generate electricity. The British are working on a way to turn waste into bio-charcoal. The Canadians are attempting to dehydrate waste by running it between rollers over smolders. The United States has proposed a solar powered toilet that converts waste into hydrogen for fuel cells.
Forget flower power, we’re talking about shit power, which is easily the coolest thing that you can do with crap. In case you live in a hole and missed it, in October the Killington Resort in central Vermont unveiled a gondola powered entirely by cow-manure. It is interesting to ponder how this can be applied on a larger scale.
If Bill Gates’ Reinventing the Toilet Campaign and cow-manure powered gondolas were not enough, enter the Sanitation Hackathon, which seeks to unleash a great-minds mashup on a pressing real-world problem. The Sanitation Hackathon builds on the success and momentum of the 2011 Water Hackathon, which took place simultaneously in 10 cities around the world and led to the development of more than 60 prototype solutions to water challenges.
From December 1st-2nd, IT and sanitation experts will join forces for an intensive brainstorming and programming marathon in cities around the world. The goal is to identify actionable sanitation challenges and then develop and deploy innovative applications to solve them.
For those who live in or near a Hackathon city, you can actively participate in the on-site sessions. To my fellow Baltimorians, on Saturday, December 1st, 2012 at 8am to Sunday, December 2nd, 2012 at 7 pm, the Sanitation Hackathon will be taking place at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. For those who can’t make it to the site, don’t be discouraged. You can contribute, vote on, and comment on problem statements, and also submit software app ideas from any location by visiting the website.
