How No-Flush Toilets Can Help Make a Healthier World
10th March 2013
Let’s get back to basics, shall we? You may have thought that the flush toilet was a remarkable scientific advance, but the nice people at Yale are here to remind you that you’re full of shit, in more ways than one.
Now various innovators are promoting new kinds of toilets and technologies that use little or no water and recycle the waste.
Prediction: These very same ‘new kinds of toilets and technologies’ have long been in use in ‘developing nations’ already; what is lacking is a basic appreciation that clean is better than not.
But although flush toilets in Nepal and the rest of South Asia may work quite well, sewer systems have not kept pace. My toilet and all the others in my Kathmandu neighborhood were connected to pipes that carried the contents of toilets away from our residences and straight into a small river a half-mile away. Stray dogs lapped the water and children played nearby.
Only the strong survive. That’s evolution. They teach it in the schools these days, whether you like it or not.
The rivers of the Indian subcontinent flow clean and clear from the Himalaya, then become little more than sewers as they run through major cities in the plains. New Delhi’s Yamuna River receives roughly half of the largely untreated sewage of a metropolis of 17 million. The Ganges, the holiest of Hindu rivers, is fouled by raw sewage from tens of millions of people as it flows 1,500 miles from the western Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal.
And yet the metropolis still has 17 million. Wonder how that happened? (I suspect the very do-gooders who are complaining about the sewage would, given the opportunity, complain about there being too many people in New Delhi. There’s no pleasing some people.)
A movement is gaining momentum to do something about this major environmental and public health problem in South Asia and the developing world.
Mostly on the part of people who don’t live in South Asia and the developing world, as we shall soon see.
The latest development in this field is the decision by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to invest $40 million in prize money and financial support to groups working on new toilet technology.
I’m certainly glad that we’ve solved all of the problems of North America so that we can parachute in to save the benighted masses of Asia with new toilet technology. No need for thanks — we do it just to feel good about ourselves.
The new toilets must convert human waste into useful (or at least benign) components without using septic systems.
The army calls these ‘latrines’, and they are of ancient origin. I’m having a hard time finding the new toilet technology here.
Most important, they must protect water sources — rivers, streams, and groundwater — from the water-borne diseases so endemic in the developing world.
So the ‘innovation’ is getting the idea through that clean is better than not. I can see how that’s a new idea in the ‘developing world’ but I don’t see that toilet technology has very much to do with it.