Sanitation? It’s in the bag!

I spent much of 2009 working on an urban sanitation study in Bangladesh. Here is a post I wrote for another blog about the innovative approach we were trying out.

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The World Health Organization estimates that over 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation. That’s over 1/3 of the earth’s population. One more time: that’s over 1/3 of the earth’s population. (And you can probably guess which part of the earth we are talking about.)

If that’s not a massive problem, I don’t know what is.

Lack of sanitation is a concern for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s just unpleasant not to have a clean, safe place to go to the toilet. But dignity aside for a moment, the crux of the problem is that poor sanitation causes disease and death. With no proper toilet (and by toilet, I don’t mean Western water-guzzling throne, but just a safe, sanitary way to do your business) to go to, people are forced to use makeshift latrines or, even worse, defecate in the open; something 1.2 billion people (think: four times the population of the United States) have no choice about.

While some of us may enjoy taking a %#&$ in the woods from time to time, the problem with persistent open defecation and unsanitary latrines, especially in densely populated areas, is that they fill the environment with dangerous bacteria. If faecal bacteria don’t get on your hands or into your water source, insects will get to it and bring all that dangerous bacteria into your home, often right onto your food. Faecal-oral contamination can cause a number of diseases (fun stuff like typhoid and cholera), the most common of which is diarrhea. Diarrhea, in addition to being very unpleasant, as most of us know, is one of the leading causes of death to children under five. In fact, diarrhea causes more deaths among children than the immunization-preventable diseases measles, tuberculosis, tetanus, diphtheria, polio and whooping cough combined! Not to mention more deaths than malaria or HIV/AIDS (more, in fact, than both combined).

Each year, almost 2 million children die of diarrhea. Or, if you like smaller numbers, over 4,500 children a day. And it’s not just children who die. Some four to six million people of all ages die each year from diarrhea.

When it comes to poverty, preventing disease and death are at the top of the list. And yet, sanitation isn’t. Is it simply because we don’t like ‘toilet talk’? Because we can’t say ‘poo’ without blushing? That seems absurdly prude of us, and yet what other reason could there be to ignore such a massive problem? It’s total, excuse the pun, crap.

Fortunately, there are brave people out there openly talking about poo and trying to come up with innovative ways to address the world’s sanitation crisis. One of those people is a poople.

Anders Wilhelmson is an architect who puzzled over the question of whether we can realistically build toilets for the 2.5 billion people who don’t have access to improved sanitation? His answer – a realistic one I would argue given the progress we are making – was ‘No’. And so he began to think outside the box. Or, in this case, inside the bag.

Wilhelmson founded Peepoople, a company that is tackling the magnitude of the sanitation crisis in the developing world with its own innovative and practical approach: the Peepoo.

Technically speaking, the Peepoo is a non-infrastructure based sanitation technology. Practically speaking, it’s a bag. But not just any bag. While its main function is pretty self-explanatory, the Peepoo does a lot more than its name lets on. The Peepoo:

• Is biodegradable.
• Provides a sanitary way to go to the toilet.
• Contains urea that quickly kills the bacteria that cause disease.
• Prevents faecal contamination of the environment.
• Saves water as it doesn’t require flushing
• Can be used anywhere the user wishes to use it.
• Turns ‘waste’ into valuable fertilizer.

Now, I know what you are probably thinking. And no, my vision of a perfect world is not one where 1/3 of the population goes to the toilet in a bag, regardless of it’s catchy name. But the world is far from perfect and in certain contexts Peepoos are a better solution than traditional, infrastructure-based latrines. Emergencies are perhaps the most obvious situation in which Peepoos would be invaluable. The current post-earthquake situation in Haiti is a good example where there is a critical lack of sanitation facilities, which could be temporarily solved by Peepoos.

But Peepoos can also be applied to other longer-term situations. Consider urban slums, where:

• Populations are dense and land is scarce, meaning that there is not always room to build toilets.
• Residents often do not own the land they live on and therefore may not have a) the right to build a toilet or b) the inclination to risk investing in a toilet when they could be evicted at any moment.
• Toilets may, in some cases, create opportunities for influential people to exercise control over access or to extort money from users.
• ‘Community toilets’ are - more often than not – unsuccessful, as people generally don’t enjoy cleaning up after one another or performing maintenance activities.
• Women in many parts of the developing world are - for social, cultural or religious reasons - not able to access public toilets during the daytime. And unfortunately, in many places, if they venture out to do so at night, they risk violent or sexual attacks.
• Infrastructure is expensive to build and maintain. One latrine can only serve a limited number of people, and lasts a limited amount of time before it is full and must be emptied or covered over and reconstructed elsewhere.
• Traditional latrines require water for flushing, which is often scarce in poorly serviced slums.
• Traditional latrines do not make use of human excreta, which is a source of valuable fertilizer for agriculture or subsistence farming.

Peepoos have been tested in urban slums in Kenya and Bangladesh. Both trials were very successful and users were keen to be able to use Peepoos regularly. It will be a while before that happens: Peepoople are still working hard to get Peepoos into the market and out to those who need them.

Having worked in developing countries on a myriad of projects attempting to tackle poverty, and having witnessed the sanitation situation of some of the world’s poorest people, I firmly believe that we won’t be successful in addressing poverty until we face up to the overwhelming lack of sanitation worldwide. If it takes a flimsy bag with a funny name to do that, so be it.

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You'll find more photos of the trial of Peepoo bags in Bangladesh here.