http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/opinion/bill-gates-cant-build-a-toilet.html?hp&rref=opinion/international&_r=0
Bill Gates Can’t Build a ToiletBy JASON KASS
Published: November 18, 2013
In addition to eradicating polio in India and starting the
personal computer revolution, the Seattle Superman of our age has
managed to make going to the bathroom a cause célèbre. Five years
ago, if I’d told people I worked on toilets, they would have surely
assumed I was a plumber. Now, they exclaim: “Oh! Isn’t Bill Gates
into that?”
More than one-third of the world’s population, approximately 2.5
billion people, doesn’t have access to a toilet. The Gates
Foundation and a handful of celebrities like Matt Damon deserve
credit for putting this sanitation crisis on the map.
The trouble is that the Gates Foundation has treated the quest
to find the proper solution as it would a cutting-edge project at
Microsoft: lots of bells and whistles, sky-high budgets and
engineers in elite institutions experimenting with the newest
technologies, thousands of miles away from their clients.
Just consider some of the parameters of the Gates Foundation’s
first Reinvent the Toilet Challenge: Create a “practical” toilet
that is suitable for a single-family residence in the developing
world. Make sure it takes in the bodily waste of an entire family
and outputs drinkable water and condiments, like salt. And while
you’re at it, make sure that the toilet is
microprocessor-supervised and converts feces into energy. And all
this has to cost just pennies per person per day. That’s some
toilet.
The winner of last year’s contest invented a solar-powered
toilet that converts poop into energy for cooking. Impressive — but
each one costs $1,000.
Other models boasted membrane systems, treatment of fecal sludge
using supercritical water oxidation (heating water to 705 degrees
Fahrenheit, or 374 degrees Celsius, then injecting oxygen) and
hydrothermal carbonization (oxidizing feces at a high temperature
and high pressure while under water).
High-tech toilets are exciting, but even the Gates Foundation
has admitted that “the economics of such a solution remain
uncertain.” In plain English: No one can afford them.
They are beyond impractical for those who need them most: the
residents of slums in countries like Haiti, Indonesia and
Bangladesh, where people make between $1 and $5 per day.
Just imagine the fate of a high-tech toilet in one of these
communities. What happens if the unique membrane systems get
clogged? Or if the supercritical water vessel or the hydrothermal
carbonization tank leaks, or worse, explodes? Or what if one of the
impoverished residents realizes the device is worth more than a
year’s earnings and decides to steal it? If the many failed
development projects of the past 60 years have taught us anything,
it’s that complicated, imported solutions do not work.
The people I’ve met in countries like Peru, El Salvador and
Haiti tend to be subsistence farmers in the countryside or
residents of big-city slums who do odd jobs to make ends meet. They
are survivors. They make use of what they have, and are often very
good at fixing things. But don’t ask them to become industrial
engineers overnight.
When I listen to Mr. Gates talk toilets, I think of Juana, who
lives in Belén, Peru, a city of 65,000 on a tributary of the Amazon
River. Her neighborhood is under water half the year. During the
other half, the drainage ditches are filled with excrement and
rats.
When Juana needs to relieve herself, she walks on a narrow plank
for about 30 feet until she arrives at her bathroom — four rotting
wooden posts wrapped with a tarp. She stands, precariously, on two
narrow slats perched above a ditch and does what she needs to do.
She also knows that her kids play nearby and worries about their
getting sick, since the waste goes directly into a stream.
Poor sanitation contributes to 2,000 childhood deaths from
diarrheal diseases every day. Unfortunately for Juana, and the
millions of people who live on marginal, waterlogged land, there
are no cheap solutions available. What they need are the kind of
toilets that they can buy or build with a few weeks’ savings.
Ecological toilets that use natural composting to break down
waste are simple to construct, waterless and are easy to fix. This
is the go-to toilet for cottage owners in America who live too
close to the water to have a septic system.
The only problem is they’re too expensive, with price tags of
over $1,000. In Haiti, an organization called SOIL has successfully
brought low-cost composting toilets to over 20,000 people, and my
organization is working on developing a more affordable
version.
Even simple solutions like the Peepoo bag, which inexpensively
(less than 2 cents per bag) sanitizes waste before turning it into
fertilizer, are huge improvements. They can also be critical in
saving lives after natural disasters.
If we embrace these low-tech toilets, we’ll be on the right
track to getting 2.5 billion people one step closer to a safe,
clean, comfortable and affordable toilet of their own. That’s
something worth celebrating this World Toilet Day.
Jason Kass is an environmental engineer and the founder of the
organization Toilets for People.
