I dont mean to be flippant, but this something we could be involved in. I was at a talk recently and the speaker telling what it is like for the poor & you have to go the toilet during the day in the countries of the Indian Subcontinent. You can imagine what it is like if you are a woman........ Something to think about
The Big Necessity
Can excrement solve the energy crisis?
By Rose George
Updated Friday, Oct. 10, 2008, at 7:08 AM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2201466/
Rose George is the author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. She lives in London.
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From: Rose George
Subject: Why I Wrote a Book About Human Waste
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2008, at 6:52 AM ET
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I need the bathroom. I assume there is one, though I'm at a spartan restaurant in the Ivory Coast, in a small town filled with refugees from next-door Liberia, where water comes in buckets and you can buy towels second-hand. The waiter, a young Liberian man, only nods when I ask. He takes me off into the darkness to a one-room building, switches on the light, and leaves. There's a white tiled floor, white tiled walls, and that's it. No toilet, no hole, no clue. I go outside to find him again and ask whether he's sent me to the right place. He smiles with sarcasm. Refugees don't have much fun, but he's having some now. "Do it on the floor. What do you expect? This isn't America!" I feel foolish. I say I'm happy to use the bushes; it's not that I'm fussy. But he's already gone, laughing into the darkness.
I need the bathroom. I leave the reading room of the British Library in central London and find a "ladies" a few yards away. If I prefer, there's another one on the far side of the same floor, and more on the other six floors. By 6 p.m., after thousands of people have entered and exited the library and the toilets, the stalls are still clean. The doors still lock. There is warm water in the clean sinks. I do what I have to do, then flush the toilet and forget it immediately, because I can, and because all my life I have done no differently.
This is why the Liberian waiter laughed at me. He thought that I thought a toilet was my right, when he knew it was a privilege.
It must be, when 2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. I don't mean that they have no toilet in their house and must use a public one with queues and fees. Or that they have an outhouse or a rickety shack that empties into a filthy drain or pigsty. All that counts as sanitation, though not a safe variety. The people who have those are the fortunate ones. But four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. Nothing. Instead, they defecate by train tracks and in forests. They do it in plastic bags and fling them through the air in narrow slum alleyways. If they are women, they get up at 4 a.m. to be able to do their business under cover of darkness for reasons of modesty, risking rape and snakebites. Four in ten people live in situations in which they are surrounded by human excrement, because it is in the bushes outside the village or in their city yards, left by children outside the back door. It is tramped back in on their feet, carried on fingers onto clothes and into food and drinking water.
The disease toll of this is stunning. Eighty percent of the world's illness is caused by fecal matter. A gram of feces can contain 10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts, and 100 worm eggs. Bacteria can be beneficial: the human body needs bacteria to function, and only 10 percent of cells in our body are actually human. Plenty are not. Small fecal particles can then contaminate water, food, cutlery, and shoes—and be ingested, drunk, or unwittingly eaten. One sanitation specialist has estimated that people who live in areas with inadequate sanitation ingest 10 grams of fecal matter every day.
Diarrhea—usually caused by feces-contaminated food or water—kills a child every fifteen seconds. That means more people dead of diarrhea than all the people killed in conflict since the Second World War. Diarrhea, says the UN children's agency UNICEF, is the largest hurdle a small child in a developing country has to overcome. Larger than AIDS, or TB, or malaria. 2.2 million people—mostly children—die from an affliction that to most westerners is the result of bad takeout. Public health professionals talk about water-related diseases, but that is a euphemism for the truth. These are shit-related diseases.
I'm often asked why I wrote The Big Necessity.
First I establish that I am no scatologist, fetishist, or coprophagist. I don't much like toilet humor (and by now I've heard a lot of it). I don't think 2.6 billion people without a toilet is funny. Then I tailor my answers and language to the social situation—still managing to spoil many lunches—by explaining the obvious. Everyone does it. It's as natural as breathing. The average human being spends three years of life going to the toilet, though the average human being with no physical toilet to go to probably does his or her best to spend less. It is a human behavior that is as revealing as any other about human nature, but only if it can be released from the social straitjacket of nicety. Rules governing defecation, hygiene, and pollution exist in every culture at every period in history.
It may in fact be the foundation of civilization: What is toilet training if not the first attempt to turn a child into an acceptable member of society? Appropriateness and propriety begin with a potty. From this comes the common claim, usually from sanitation activists, that the toilet is the barometer of civilization. How a society disposes of its human excrement is an indication of how it treats its humans, too. Unlike other body-related functions like dance, drama, and songs, wrote the Indian sanitarian Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, "defecation is very lowly." Yet when discussing it, he continued, "one ends up discussing the whole spectrum of human behavior, national economy, politics, role of media, cultural preference and so forth." And that's a partial list. It is missing biology, psychology, chemistry, language. It is missing everything that touches upon understanding what the development academic William Cummings called "the lonely bewilderment of bodily functions."
If my questioner is religious, I say that all the world's great faiths instruct their followers how best to manage their excrement, because hygiene is holy. I explain that taking an interest in the culture of sanitation puts them in good company. Mohandas K. Gandhi, though he spent his life working towards ridding India of its colonial rulers, nonetheless declared that sanitation was more important than independence. The great architect Le Corbusier considered it to be "one of the most beautiful objects industry has ever invented"; and Rudyard Kipling found sewers more compelling than literature. Drains are "a great and glorious thing," he wrote in 1886, "and I study 'em and write about 'em when I can." A decent primer on sanitary engineering, he wrote, "is worth more than all the tomes of sacred smut ever produced." Anton Chekhov was moved to write about the dreadful sanitation in the far-Eastern Russian isle of Sakhalin. And Sigmund Freud thought the study of excretion essential and its neglect a stupidity. In his foreword to The Scatologic Rites of All Nations, an impressive ethnography of excrement by the amateur anthropologist—and U.S. army captain—John Bourke, Freud wrote that "to make [the role of excretions in human life] more accessible ... is not only a courageous but also a meritorious undertaking."
If the cultural standing of excrement doesn't convince them, I say that the material itself is as rich as oil and probably more useful. It contains nitrogen and phosphates, which can make plants grow but also suck the life from water because its nutrients absorb available oxygen. It can be both food and poison. It can contaminate and cultivate. Millions of people cook with gas made by fermenting it. I tell them I don't like to call it "waste," when it can be turned into bricks, when it can make roads or jewelry, and when, in a dried powdered form called poudrette, it was sniffed like snuff by the grandest ladies of the 18th-century French court. Medical men of not too long ago thought stool examination a vital diagnostic tool. (London's Wellcome Library holds a 150-year-old engraving of a doctor examining a bedpan and a sarcastic maid asking him whether he'd like a fork.) They were also fond of prescribing it: Excrement could be eaten, drunk, or liberally applied to the skin. Martin Luther was convinced: he reportedly ate a spoonful of his own excrement daily, and wrote that he couldn't understand the generosity of a God who freely gave such important and useful remedies.
Starting tomorrow in Slate, we'll talk about toilets in outer space and a burgeoning movement to turn human waste into drinking water. We'll bring you a report on the lowest of India's untouchables, the latrine cleaner—and one man's plan to improve their lot. And we'll hear about an excrement-into-fuel technology that's changing life in some Chinese villages. Stay tuned.
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From: Rose George
Subject: From Toilet to Tap
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2008, at 6:54 AM ET
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The most expensive toilet on earth is designed never to be used on earth. At a cost of $23.4 million, the toilet designed for NASA's space shuttles may seem a ludicrous waste of money. It certainly wouldn't impress Bindeshwar Pathak of the Indian toilet-building charity Sulabh, whose handbook complains that "our scientists think of going to the moon, [but a] toilet is not in their vision at all."
Yet NASA's attempts to improve the disposal of its crews' excreta in the skies could lead the way for the earth-bound. The Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS), which controls the living environment on shuttles and on the International Space Station, doesn't have the luxury of disposal: discharging trash into space has long been judged a bad idea. In the past, astronauts' conditions were considerably more primitive. Alan Shepard set off for the first Mercury shuttle flight on May 5, 1961, with no provision for any excretion, as the flight was supposed to last fifteen minutes. When it was delayed by four hours, Mission Control gave Shepard permission to pee in his space suit.
"It was a very real problem," says Amanda Young, curator of early space flight at the National Air and Space Museum. Fecal bags were developed for the Apollo missions. These stuck to the astronauts' backside, were sealed with Velcro after use, then stored until landing. Urine could be dumped overboard, but a hole big enough to dump feces in space could make the spacecraft too vulnerable. "If you have a break in the skin of the craft," says Young, "oxygen is sucked out of the astronauts. They begin to boil. They'd die in twenty seconds." For the moon landings, all astronauts were wearing "fecal containment devices"—like padded shorts—as well as a urine collection bag attached to the suit with a valve. No one used the fecal options, but a famous photo of Buzz Aldrin is known in certain circles as "Buzz whizzing."
Asking how astronauts go to the bathroom is one of the most common questions put during NASA or space museum outreach sessions, Young says. "Interest from the public is strange. Women don't care. They think, they worked it out and that's that. Men have an almost unhealthy interest. Children are interested in the poop factor." What everybody should actually be interested in is the drinking-pee factor.
Water weighs a kilogram a liter. It is heavy and therefore expensive: it costs $40,000 to transport each gallon up to the International Space Station. They don't want to load a shuttle or space station with extra weight, but they need water. So the ECLSS does what anyone would do in straitened circumstances: it turns urine into drinking water. On future space station missions, and on the planned 2012 mission to Mars, astronauts will be drinking their own urine, sweat, breath, and tears because they have to. Officially, this process is called reuse or reclaiming, and it may be the future of the planet. In fact, it's already happening.
Water is a fixed commodity. At any time in history, the planet contains about 332 million cubic miles of it. Most is salty. Only 2 percent is freshwater and two-thirds of that is unavailable for human use, locked in snow, ice, and permafrost. We are using the same water that the dinosaurs drank, and this same water has to make ice creams in Pasadena and the morning frost in Paris. It is limited, and it is being wasted. In 2000, twice as much water was used throughout the world as in 1960. By 2050, half of the planet's projected 8.9 billion people will live in countries that are chronically short of water.
But usage is only part of the problem. We are wasting our water mostly by putting waste into it. One cubic meter of wastewater can pollute ten cubic meters of water. Discharging wastewater into oceans turns freshwater into the less useful salty stuff, and desalination is expensive.
The reuse of wastewater effluent is now being proposed in several areas. In Toowoomba, Australia, where rainfall has decreased 30 percent in the last thirty years, local councilor Dianne Thorley told a TV interviewer that if she had her way, there would be "advanced water treatment plants bolted onto every sewage plant in Australia." She was convinced that a system using advanced ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, and UV disinfection—or the best cleansing modern science can provide—would ensure adequate safety. Not everyone takes so enthusiastically to the idea. In San Diego, the so-called "Toilet to Tap" proposal was rejected by voters, and a new and expensive reuse project in Orange County, California, continues to cause consternation. In Arizona, a case involving a leisure firm wanting to use recycled wastewater to make artificial snow for a mountain considered sacred by 13 Native American tribes may soon head for the Supreme Court, so deep do feelings run.
Yet toilets already go to taps. Countless human settlements take their drinking water from the same sources into which other countless human settlements discharge their raw or treated sewage. Several American municipalities already do this "indirect potable reuse." The Upper Occoquan Sewage Authority's effluent supplies 20 percent of the inflow into the Occoquan Reservoir, which gives the residents of Fairfax County, Virginia, their drinking water. In droughts, it can supply 90 percent, and the sewage authority maintains that its highly treated effluent is cleaner than most water sources that end up in the reservoir.
Reuse works better when it involves camouflage. This technique is used, appropriately for a militarized country, in Israel. During a presentation at a London wastewater conference, a beautiful woman from Israel's Mekorot wastewater treatment utility, who stood out in a room full of gray suits, explained that they fed the effluent into an aquifer, withdrew it, then used it as potable water. "It is psychologically very important," she told the rapt audience, "for people to know that the water is coming from the aquifer." This is a clever way of getting around fecal aversion. Not having wastewater—and not wasting water—would be better still.
Devotees of ecological sanitation—"eco-san"—think that composting or urine-diverting toilets are the solution. Though it only makes up 5 percent of the flow, urine contains 80 percent of the nitrogen and 45 percent of the phosphorus that has to be removed at treatment works. Separating it at source would cut down treatment processes and costs. A urine-separation toilet also cuts water use by 80 percent. In the remote Chinese village of Gan Quan Fang, a schoolteacher named Zhang Min Shu extolled the virtues of his urine-diverting toilet to me with a big grin. "It's very scientific. There are two solid waste containers. We only need to clean it once a year. Once it's full, we swap the containers around." The contents of the full container are removed, hopefully now safely composted and pathogen-free, and applied to fields. The empty container moves into the full one's place, and another year should go happily by. Done properly, eco-san turns waste into safe, sowable goodness. Done properly, there's little argument against it. It is sustainable. It closes the nutrient loop, which sewers and wastewater treatment plants have torn open by throwing everything into rivers and the sea, damaging water and depriving land of fertilizer.
Yet eco-san provokes hostility. I hear references to the "eco-mafia" or to those "damned Germans and Swedes," the two leading eco-san nations. Sanitation experts who have tried and failed for years to persuade people to invest in a $50 basic cement slab and pit understandably wonder how they'd persuade people to spend $300—the average cost of an eco-san latrine—instead.
Petter Jenssen is an agricultural professor at the Norway University of Agriculture and a confirmed proponent of eco-san. I ask him why eco-san fans annoy everyone who isn't one. "The way people present eco-san is often a bit religious," he says, meaning the fundamentalist kind. "It's eco-san or nothing but. That can trigger people's resentment. Also, early systems did have drawbacks and they didn't see them." If done wrong, eco-san can leave pathogens in the composted or dehydrated excreta. Even if done well, it may not get rid of worm eggs. Also, it can require huge behavior changes that are notoriously difficult to achieve. Urine diversion toilets, for a start, require men to urinate sitting down, a shock to anyone used to the ease of what Germans call stand-peeing. Not every man, I suspect, would be as amenable as Mr. Zhang in Gan Quan Fang, who is serene about such things. "For me," he tells me with a big, satisfied smile, "whatever the toilet is, I use it. For example, here we eat wheat. When we go to the south of China, we eat rice. Otherwise we starve."
The flush toilet needn't be the holy grail of hygiene. Canadian academic Gregory Rose points to the example of cell phone technology. Developing countries without phone systems didn't bother with telephone poles and underground cables. They vaulted directly to cell phones and satellite communications. Similarly, in sanitation, Rose writes, "[t]he opportunity I see for developing countries is to leapfrog over the dinosaur technologies we have funded and implemented in the North and move to these advanced technologies," such as composting latrines or waste stabilization ponds. It is time for appropriate sanitation technology, not blind faith in flushing.
The concept of sustainability, as promoted by eco-san fans, has now penetrated even the rich world of engineering certainties and infrastructurally invasive sewers and wastewater-treatment plants. A large sewage-treatment plant uses a quarter of the energy of a coal-fired power station. As the United Kingdom's environment minister recently realized, "there's a carbon impact here that simply has to be tackled." David Stuckey, an engineering professor at London's Imperial College, thinks change must come, and it will be through economics. "People are looking to invest in wastewater treatment," he tells me. "You don't have to be a genius—just look at the price of resources and the cost of nitrogen and phosphorous. Once costs go up, people change."
Other things will also have to be tackled. Hospital pharmaceuticals in wastewater will be the next headache. In a recent investigation, the city of Philadelphia utility found 90 percent of the drugs it tested for, including evidence of medicines used for heart disease, mental illness, epilepsy, and asthma. A senior EPA official admitted that "there needs to be more searching, more analysis."
Petter Jenssen sits on the other side of the waterborne sewerage and ecological-sanitation divide, but he agrees. "We've invested so much in conventional sewerage. There are many economic interests tangled up in it. It depends on what politicians dare to do. Maybe it will take another fifty years to reach a sustainable system. But things can happen. Fifteen years ago I was considered a romantic scientist. Now I'm chairman of the national Water Association."
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From: Rose George
Subject: Latrine Rights in India
Posted Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008, at 7:06 AM ET
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It drips on her head most days, says Champaben, but in the monsoon season it's worse. In rain, worms multiply. Every day, nonetheless, she gets up and walks to her owners' house, and there she picks up their excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket, puts the basket on her head or shoulders and carries it to the nearest waste dump. She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance, if she is paid at all. She regularly gets dysentery, giardiasis, brain fever. She does this because a 3,000-year-old social hierarchy says she has to.
They used to be known as bhangi, a word formed from the Sanskrit for "broken," and the Hindi for "trash." Today, official India calls them the "scheduled castes," but activists prefer Dalits, a word that means "broken" or "oppressed" but with none of the negativity of bhangi. Most modern Indians don't stick to their caste jobs any more. There is more inter-caste marriage, more fluidity, more freedom than ever before. But the outcastes are usually still outcastes, because they are still the ones who tan India's animals, burn its dead, and remove its excrement. Champaben is considered untouchable by other untouchables—even the tanners of animals and the burners of corpses—because she is a safai karamchari. This literally means "sweeper" but is generally translated into English as "manual scavenger," a term popularized by India's British rulers, who did nothing to eradicate the practice and much to keep it going. This scavenging has none of the usefulness of the usual meaning. There is no salvaging of waste, no making good of the discarded. Champaben recycles nothing and gains nothing. She takes filth away, and for this she is considered dirt.
There are between 400,000 and 1.2 million manual scavengers in India, depending on who is compiling the figures. They are employed—owned, more accurately—by private families and by municipalities, by army cantonments and railway authorities. Their job is to clean up feces wherever it presents itself: on railway tracks, in clogged sewers. Mostly, they empty India's dry latrines. A latrine is usually defined as a receptacle in the ground which holds human excreta, but dry latrines often don't bother with receptacles. They consist of two bricks, usually, placed squatting distance apart, over flat ground. There is no pit. There may be a channel or gutter nearby, but that would be luxury. The public ones usually have no doors, no stalls, and no water. There are still up to ten million dry latrines in India, and they probably only survive because Champaben and others are still prepared to clean them.
I meet Champaben in a village in rural Gujarat. Like every other state in India, Gujarat is bound by the 1993 Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, which makes manual scavenging illegal on pain of a year's imprisonment or a 2,000 rupee ($45) fine. On paper, Champaben doesn't exist, and on paper, she is as free as the next villager. Untouchability has been illegal in India since 1949, when it was abolished by means of Article 17 of the constitution.
Champaben knows that. But what can she do? Scavengers have been doing their work since they were children, and they will do it until they die, and then their children will take over. Champaben's mother-in-law, Gangaben, is 75 years old. She has been scavenging for 50 years. In a village nearby, I meet Hansa and her daughter Meena, who is 10. Meena has already been introduced to her mother's job, because she has to do it when her mother is ill or pregnant or both. Most manual scavenging is done by women, who marry into it and have no choice. Men in the manual scavenger class often hide their profession from prospective brides until it's too late, and they can escape their foul work in alcohol because they have a wife to do it for them. Some scavengers work in cities as sewer cleaners and unclog blockages with their bare hands, their only protection a rope. They are regularly killed. Last year, three men died of asphyxiation when they entered a manhole in New Delhi.
The women talk freely. They are chatty and assertive and pristine. I look at them and try to see the dirt on them and in them, but I can't. They are elegant and beautiful even when they bend down to pick up the two pieces of cracked tin they use to scoop up the feces; when they demonstrate how they sweep the filth into the basket; when they lift the basket high with arms glittering with bangles and considerable grace. Their compound is dusty but not dirty, though they are not given soap by their owners and though they are not allowed to get water from the well without permission from an upper caste villager. They offer me a tin beaker of yellow water. "Look at it," says Mukesh, an activist from a local Dalit organization called Navsarjan who has accompanied me. "Look at what they have to drink." The beaker presents a quandary. I consider pathogens and fecal-oral contamination pathways, and I consider that they'll expect me to refuse to take a drink from an untouchable, because many Indians would. I take a sip and hope for the best, feeling pious and foolish, imagining bugs and worms slipping down into my guts, wreaking havoc.
In the late 1960s, the young Bindeshwar Pathak was studying sociology, and like many young Indians, getting used to being part of a newly independent and ambitious nation, he was an idealist. His ideals were those of Mohandas K. Gandhi. The father of the modern Indian nation was one of the few political leaders in history to talk publicly about toilets. There is a scene in Richard Attenborough's biopic where Gandhi argues with his wife because she refuses to clean their latrine. She says it is the work of untouchables; he tells her there is no such thing.
Gandhi's tactics of encouraging brotherly love across caste boundaries and urging Indians to clean their own latrines had failed miserably. The status quo was too convenient. Pathak decided a better solution was to provide an alternative technology. Scavengers' jobs would never be surplus to India's needs, not with a population of a billion excreting people. Perhaps the solution was to make scavengers unemployable by eradicating dry latrines. Not by knocking them down, but by providing a better latrine model that didn't require humans to clean it but that was cheap and easy. Most importantly, it had to be easy to keep nice. Given a choice between a smelly, dirty latrine and the street, even the most desperate might choose the latter. Pathak read WHO manuals about pit latrines and developed his own version.
It had to be on-site, because India has neither water nor sewers enough to install expensive waterborne treatment systems. Even today, only 232 of India's 5,233 towns have even partial sewer coverage. Indian urban wastewater treatment consisted of dumping it in rivers. The mighty Yamuna river, which supposedly dropped to earth from heaven but which actually runs nearly 200 miles from the Himalayas through the nation's capital, has millions of gallons of sewage poured into it every day. By the time it reaches Delhi, the Yamuna is dead. As for the Ganges, its fecal coliform count makes its supposedly purifying waters a triumph of wishful thinking, unless the purification is the kind you get from chronic diarrhea, dysentery, or cholera.
Pathak called his new latrine the Sulabh Shauchalaya ("Easy Latrine"). It was twin-pit and pour-flush. It could be flushed with only a cupful of water, compared with the ten liters needed for flush toilets. There was no need to connect it to sewers or septic tanks, because the excreta could compost in one pit, and when that was full, after two to four years, the latrine owner could switch to the other, leaving the full pit to compost. This was another Gandhian concept: The Mahatma had used the phrase tatti par mitti ("soil over shit"), and would dig a pit for his own excreta then cover it with soil when it was full. The Great Soul of India was a pioneering composter. The Easy Latrine leached its liquids into the ground but supposedly without polluting groundwater. Most importantly, it was cheap, with the most inexpensive model costing only 500 rupees ($10).
Despite all this, Pathak's technology found no takers for three years. He had to sell some of his wife's jewelry and resorted to peddling his grandfather's bottles of home-cure remedies. Until one day, when he entered an office in a town in Bihar and sold the idea of the Sulabh model to the municipal officer on duty.
The Sulabh model consisted of more than the latrine. It was also a method. Pathak saw how the aid and grant-making world worked. Budgets and donor cycles are fixed. They can be withdrawn after a few years with little notice. Pathak decided that Sulabh would not accept grants. It would make sanitation a business that paid for itself.
It doesn't sound radical, but it was. In the 1970s, development experts were convinced that poor people wouldn't pay for sanitation. Since then, this has been proven to be nonsense. Poor people pay up to ten times more for water—from water gangsters or private tankers—than a resident with municipal water supply. United Kingdom regulations concluded that spending more than 3 percent of the household budget was an indicator of hardship. But poor people in Uganda, for example, spend 22 percent of their budget on water.
Pathak thought people would pay, so he developed a range of models for all budgets and tastes. His social-service organization would be nonprofit, but it would be a business. This thinking was new.
In the 1970s, public toilets in India were a rare sight. The few in existence were squalid and offered little advantage to defecating on the pavement outside, so people often chose the street instead. Pathak had an idea that was simple, new, and apparently doomed. If people had a clean toilet with water and light, they'd probably be willing to pay for it. "People laughed at me," he recalls. "They said, in Bihar, people don't pay for bus tickets and rail tickets. Why would they pay for toilets?"
But his negotiation skills served him well, because in 1973, the first Sulabh public toilet opened in Patna, the state capital of Bihar. It had water, electricity, and round-the-clock attendants. Sulabh charged one rupee for toilet use, and urinals for men were free. (Women could also urinate for free, but they have to specify their needs to the caretaker.) A wash cost two rupees. In the first day, Pathak says, 500 people used it.
Sulabh's concept of pay-per-use was not new—a similar government program had been tried, and failed, several years earlier. But the business model was. Instead of funding toilets with government grants, Sulabh approached authorities and municipalities and suggested something different: if the authority paid for the cost of constructing the toilet and provided the land, Sulabh would run it for a set number of years and keep the profits. The business model was an attractive one to municipal authorities who, back then, could not be bothered with sanitation. "Before, no-one wanted to know," says Pathak. "In the beginning, we couldn't find anyone willing to tender to construct toilets. The upper castes wouldn't consider it. They wouldn't even come to meetings. Now they fight for the tenders. We have blended social reform and economic gain."
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From: Rose George
Subject: In One End and Out the Burner
Posted Friday, Oct. 10, 2008, at 7:08 AM ET
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Of all the peoples of the world, the Chinese are probably the most at home with their excrement. They know its value. For 4,000 years they have used raw human feces to fertilize fields. China's use of "night soil," as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations—the Maya, for one—floundered when their soils turned to dust.
Sanitation professionals sometimes divide the world into fecal-phobic and fecal-philiac cultures. India is the former (though only when the dung is not from cows); China is definitely and blithely the latter. Nor is the place of excrement confined to the fields. It has featured prominently in Chinese public life and literature for at least a thousand years.
In the Communist era, excrement took on political importance, because Party policy decided excrement was essential for the Great Agricultural Leap Forward. Andrew Morris, a historian at California Polytechnic, relates the story of night-soil carrier Shi Chuanxiang, who in 1959 was a star speaker at the Communist Party's National Conference of Heroes. Shi Chuanxiang worked for the exploitative gangs who controlled Beijing's night-soil collection. Customers showed their appreciation for his work by calling him "Mr. Shitman" or "Stinky Shit Egg."
These days, this national interest takes the form of serious investment into an unusual alternative fuel. Along with all the other stunning statistics China can provide, it can also claim to be the world leader in making energy from human excrement.
Biogas, as this energy is known, can be produced from the fermentation of any organic material, from wood to vegetables to human excreta. In an oxygen-free digester, which acts somewhat like a human stomach, micro-organisms break down the material into sugar and acids, which then become gas. Mostly methane, with carbon dioxide and a little hydrogen sulfide, biogas can be used as fuel for cooking hobs, lights, and, sometimes, showers. It can also be converted into electricity. The slurry that remains from the digestion process is good fertilizer and considerably safer than raw excrement.
At last count, if official figures are reliable, 15.4 million rural households in China are connecting their toilets to a biogas digester, switching on their stoves a few hours later and cooking with the proceeds. India has installed several million digesters, though they run on cow dung, and there are only so many cows. China has a billion humans, and that means a billion suppliers of a cheap and inexhaustible supply of clean energy.
Perched on a bed in her office in Xi'an, Wang Ming Ying explains why she was convinced enough by biogas to change her life. A tiny woman fizzing with energy, she now runs the Shaanxi Mothers environmental association. For her, it began with the trees. As an official in a government propaganda office, she was sent to the UN women's conference in Beijing in 1995, and it changed her life. "I saw," she tells me, "how the poverty of women is directly related to the deterioration of the environment." Poor rural women try to clear more land for crops by cutting down forests. This brought on soil erosion, so more forest was cleared for new crop land. It was a vicious cycle that no one knew how to escape.
Wang Ming Ying set off to northern Shaanxi province "to see what was going on." She found hillsides empty of trees and farmers devoid of hope. "I thought that if a woman has education or not, we can do environmental protection together." She decided to form an organisation of women. Mothers, actually. "Mothers are key: they can influence the family."
The group's name was surprisingly controversial. "The government didn't like the word 'volunteers.' " Voluntary activity was a problematic concept in China then. Public service was always imposed from above. The state controlled everything, and that included excreting habits and public hygiene. Throughout the 1950s, for example, the Chinese government tried several times to eradicate a plague of schistosomiasis, an infection of a parasitic worm found in dirty rice-paddy water. (It's also known as bilharzia or, in Chinese, "blood-sucking worm disease.") Shepherd boys, according to a report, "were mobilized to pick up stray excreta."
But Wang Ming Ying persisted and, after a few years of environmental work—there was a lot of litter-collection—Shaanxi Mothers were shown a video of biogas technology. They liked it, and decided to try it out with two test families in northern Shaanxi. The families lived in a village that had a fate typical of the area. Thirty years earlier, its population had consisted of four families, and the village was surrounded by trees. By the time Shaanxi Mothers arrived, there were thirty-four families and the forest was almost gone.
Biogas was an ideal solution. Two families were chosen to try out the digesters. The technique was simple enough: add pig excrement and human waste to the digester, occasionally stir it, and tap off the energy. But when the Mothers arrived for a follow-up survey, neither digester was being used. Eventually, Wang Ming Ying discovered that one of the families' toddler sons, Peng, had died by drowning in the pit. The Shaanxi Mothers learned a lesson: you can't install technology (the hardware) without ensuring the human element (the software) is also operational. Follow-up is essential. They began talking to their biogas users, a lot. It worked.
Ten years on, Shaanxi Mothers have installed 1,294 digesters in 26 villages. They have won prizes and got funding, though never enough. The money goes to subsidizing a third of the cost of a digester, with the householder and the government making up the rest. Wang Ming Ying estimates that for every new biogas digester installed, 1.2 tons of firewood—three trees—will be spared. She tells me to go and see for myself.
The journey to Da Li is long. It goes along roads that are so new they're not on the map and roads so bad they are flattened rocks with aspirations to being a thoroughfare. After several hours of bone-rattling driving, we arrive in northwest Shaanxi Province. There are boxes of apples everywhere, being loaded onto trucks, stacked on street corners. This is apple country. What the buyers of apples probably don't know is that this is apples-fertilized-with-human-excreta country.
Wang Ming Ying is a hero here, and all due courtesy is being extended. A blackboard bears the phrase "We wholeheartedly welcome the advice and arrival of our superior leaders," and bowls of apples and grapes have been thoughtfully set out on the table. They have been fertilized with biogas slurry, the village leader tells me with pride. Look, he says, how juicy the apples are. They are better now that we use biogas. The skin is thinner and the juice is sweeter. Even rice is better. Rice cooked with biogas is chewier and less likely to stick.
One of my hosts says there have been three main changes. "Human and national excreta is now turned into treasure. Households are much cleaner. Neighbors have a better relationship." Also, farmers' incomes have increased. Annually, they save 1,400 yuan ($200) on fertilizer, fuel, and the medicines they would otherwise have to buy for the constant diarrhea and stomach illnesses caused by filthy latrines. Also, farmers save two canisters of cooking gas per year, worth 120 yuan ($20). Using biogas for lighting saves another 40 yuan ($5) on energy bills. All in all, she says, the village has increased its income by 300,000 yuan ($43,000) a year. "The village," she concludes firmly, "is happier and wealthier."
Before biogas, most villagers had used a hole in the backyard as a latrine. In Da Li, as in countless other villages, things began to change when the city came back to the country. Youngsters who had gone to the city got used to different standards. "They were coming home and complaining about the mao kun," says Zhou. "They didn't want to use it anymore." They demanded better facilities for their visits home, making fertile ground for the Shaanxi Mothers to make their biogas case. The women of Da Li proved to be powerful allies. The reason why becomes obvious when Zhou leads me to his house and into the kitchen, past the cartful of apples in the driveway. Here, his wife gives me a demonstration of how she used to live and breathe. She kneels in front of her cast-iron oven, pretending to feed it with kindling and rice stalks, and mimes how she used to cough and how her eyes would water. The ovens are still used to bake bread, but otherwise the two-ring biogas burner is enough for three meals a day in summer and two in winter.
Biogas is not perfect. As the tragedy of Peng showed, digesters can fail because of mechanics and human error. Also, there is little agreement on how safe the slurry actually is. Opinions vary as to whether a four-week digestion process, for example, kills all pathogens. Ascaris eggs, which grow into long and revolting worms, are exceptionally hardy. (They are also still unvanquished, though humanity has been dealing with them forever: ascaris have been detected in fossilized Peruvian dung dating from 2277 B.C.) Swedish academic Mathias Gustavsson, a fan of biogas—he refers to it as a "solution in search of its problem"—writes that "there is no such thing as a total removal of all parasites due to an anaerobic process."
But a biogas digester has to be better than a bucket. And it has enormous potential: In the French city of Lille, ten city buses now run on biogas taken from the city's sewage works, and city officials claim the biogas buses are carbon neutral and less polluting (biogas gives off fewer particles).
In Da Li, they're not bothered about buses. In a courtyard behind a carved wooden door, a woman sits weaving as if she's been doing it for centuries. In fact, she only got the loom a year ago. A gas made from something we all flush away without thought has given her cheaper bills, a cleaner environment, and something she's never had before, called free time.
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