The Big Necessity (36 page)

The village headman's toilet is right in front of the kitchen. His was the first to be installed because he's the Party secretary. Jessie and Cissie finish their tea and take me to see some more. Look up, they say. Every house with an eco-san toilet has a vent pipe and the street is dotted with them, like sanitary chimney stacks. The volunteers won't take me to the houses that haven't installed toilets yet, because they don't want to embarrass the farmers. Instead, we go to meet the teachers. Wu Zhao Xian and Zhang Min Shu both teach primary school. He is tall and thin; she is shorter, wider. Mrs. Wu has a wonderful giggle. They serve delicious tea in the kitchen, which is where Plan wanted to put their toilet. Impossible! That was too near food. The toilet is in the courtyard now,
a decent distance away. “We thought it would stink. Now we know it doesn't, we'd have it anywhere in the house.” I ask to use the bathroom, because I'm on my fourth cup of tea in an hour, and the small room, with a curtain for a door (“only for some privacy when we shower”) is clean and decent.

Mr. Zhang explains how his “techno toilet” works. “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-sanitation 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. The arguments in favor of ecological sanitation are numerous and persuasive.

Yet it provokes hostility. I hear references to the “eco-mafia,” to those “damned Germans and Swedes,” the two leading eco-san nations. One sanitation professional says, “What I hate about this sector is how things develop into fashions and all of a sudden, the answer's eco-san, now what's your problem? But all eco-san wants to do is close the loop. They're not thinking about changing hygiene behavior.” Pete Kolsky, who admittedly works for the World Bank, an institution that continues to invest in waterborne sewerage for developing countries, is yet to be convinced by eco-sanitation. “I will give the argument its intellectual due,” he says, “that it's about nutrient recycling for growing food. The trouble is that people then forget about public health, and if I can't convince a household to invest $50 in a basic cement slab and a pit, what on earth makes you think I'm going to convince them to invest $300 in an eco-san latrine?”

I phone the Norwegian mafia. Petter Jenssen is an agricultural professor at the Norway University of Agriculture and a confirmed proponent of eco-san. I ask him why the debate is so acrimonious. Why do 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.” Eco-san if done wrong can leave pathogens in the composted or dehydrated excreta. Even when 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.”

Jenssen says the technology is better now, and so are the persuasive techniques that can make behavior change possible. Eco-san advocates have learned that talking about “sustainable sanitation” raises fewer hackles.

The new refrain in sanitation is “flexibility.” Darren Saywell of the International Water Association wants to get rid of the “sanitation ladder,” the concept of a sanitary progression that starts with a pit latrine and always ends with the desired ideal of a flush toilet and waterborne sewerage. He thinks the ladder is too linear. The flush toilet doesn't have to 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, “The 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 other fashionable concept is sustainability. This has penetrated even the rich world of engineering certainties and infrastructurally invasive sewers and wastewater treatment plants. At the wastewater treatment conference I attended in London, the biggest draw by far was a presentation by Duncan Mara about waste stabilization ponds. Afterward,
I asked Mara why he was so popular. He wasn't certain but thought that it was probably due to panic. Wastewater treatment plants now have to conform to strict EU energy limits, and ponds don't require electricity. Governments have finally noticed that wastewater treatment is not green. A sewage works uses up to 11.5 watts of energy per head, or a quarter of the output of the UK's largest coal-fired power station. The UK's environment minister made this point in a new national water strategy, when he wrote that “there's a carbon impact here that simply has to be tackled.”

Other things will also have to be tackled. Pharmaceuticals in wastewater will be the next headache. A recent investigation discovered that 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. These are tiny, trace elements, admittedly. Studies have shown that pharmaceutical residues have made male frogs produce eggs and deformed some fish. As for the effects on humans, no one yet knows. But being exposed to other people's excreted drugs in drinking water, said one environmental health professor, “can't be good.” A senior EPA official admitted that “there needs to be more searching, more analysis.”

David Stuckey, an engineering professor at London's Imperial College, was recently awarded nearly a million dollars to develop an innovative anaerobic process that reduces sludge volumes by 90 percent. This will save enormous amounts of money and considerable carbon dioxide. He 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.”

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.”

_____

 

In the toiletless world, there is cautious hope. The Prince of Orange, chair of the UN Secretary General's sanitation advisory panel, is a significant man, says Eddy Perez of the World Bank, and he represents an increasingly significant cause. “Not only is he royalty,” says Perez, over coffee in the World Bank's gleaming lobby, “but he knows what he's talking about. He comes to the Bank and has meetings with vice presidents to say, ‘What are you doing about sanitation?' Two years ago that would have been completely unbelievable.” An outsider might think that he gets such access because he's the figurehead of the International Year of Sanitation 2008. This must be a big deal. In fact, the International Year of Sanitation nearly lost out to the International Year of the Potato when potato-growing New Zealanders objected. Now there are two dirt-related years on offer. Toilets or tubers.

UN years are notoriously meaningless. This one may seem remarkably empty when the sanitation Millennium Development Goal is currently the farthest off target. To meet its goal, 95,000 toilets must be installed every day. One toilet per second, every twenty-four hours until 2015. Nonetheless, Pete Kolsky, who describes himself as a glass-half-empty man, thinks something has shifted. “This sector has finally got its act together. I don't think it's widespread among politicians yet but it's getting there. They're getting a clear and coherent message that, goddammit, it's time to talk about crap.”

 

People who work in sanitation sometimes have visions. Eco-san people see a future where instead of controlling pollution after it happens, we prevent it in the first place by some kind of source separation. Water separated from excreta; urine separated from feces. The discarded products of the human body given treatment appropriate to one name (shit, meaning to separate), not another (waste, from the Latin
vastus
meaning unoccupied or uncultivated). I read about a cleaner new world where people put out their trash cans full of fecal compost to be collected on a Monday, like they do with garbage.

Why not? Recycling is relatively new yet pervasive (though not necessarily much use and rarely lucrative). Three thousand Swedes have NoMix urine separation toilets. Large-scale eco-san projects in Linz, Austria, and Dongsheng, Inner Mongolia, are working, more or less, though the Austrians are hampered by legislation forbidding them to reuse urine, and the Inner Mongolians have a bad habit of cleaning their urine diversion toilets by flushing water down them, defeating their source-separating purpose. These visions are seductive from an environmental perspective, but I wonder if they are realistic. The flush toilet is ubiquitous because it is useful. It removes excreta from the living environment; it doesn't take up space; it can be situated inside a house; it can be used in multi-story housing, and it doesn't smell. It seems unassailable as the default option of how to dispose of human excreta in sophisticated, wealthy places.

But it can evolve. In a small French village near the house where I wrote this book, there is a tiny public toilet on a bridge. It has been replaced by newer toilets that do not, as this one did, dispense with sewage by means of a big hole and the river below, and is locked and unused. On the wall outside the toilet, someone has fixed copies of the original designs and documents that were drawn up to build the toilet a hundred years earlier. The documents are a sign of pride, and rightly. I like engineers. They build things that are useful and sometimes beautiful—a brick sewer, a suspension bridge—and take little credit. They do not wear black and designer glasses like architects. They do not crow. Many of the world's waterborne sewage systems are engineering marvels. The public health benefits are undeniably stunning and still persisting two centuries on. There are plenty of reasons to support waterborne sewerage, to be a fan of flushing. On the riverside path running alongside Crossness, there is a poster celebrating the work of Joseph Bazalgette. The title reads, “Great Stink—Great Solution.” But it's the assumption that the sewer is the solution that has prevented evolution.

Since I started researching this book, I've noticed I do some things differently. I always put the toilet seat lid down before I flush because I've learned that urine sprays fine mists. I use less toilet paper and more
soap and water. I wash my hands more, and mostly follow the five-step handwashing guidelines provided by the Centers for Disease Control, which at some point I plan to pin up in most pub urinals and the student bathrooms at the London School of Hygiene. Because I wash my hands more I use more hand cream, and when I wash my hands again, I think of organic chemicals and pharmaceutical residues going down the drain. Yet I still use the hand cream and the shampoo and the facial wash and all the other products helping to top up my body burden.

What else? I notice manholes. I scowl at paved-over front gardens. I pour used cooking oil on a flowerbed, in memory of those fat-blocked sewers. If it's not urgent, I don't flush the toilet immediately and I don't feel bad about it. This is what hygiene specialists would call behavior change. The sociologist Harvey Molotch prefers to call it “the moral rectitude of pee.” He explains: during a five-year drought in California, people stopped flushing urinals to save water. “I was in the restroom one day with a colleague from overseas who said, that's disgusting. It hit me that it's not disgusting. In a drought context, darker yellow pee in urinals signified moral rectitude.” Petter Jenssen tells me about the children of a friend. “He had put in a composting toilet and when his children started kindergarten they didn't want to go to the toilet because they could see shit floating in the water and they were used to a black hole. You can get used to anything.”

 

It's no use dismissing sanitation as a problem of the poor. It's true that hardly anyone in the developed world now dies from dirty water. But the diseases of the poor now travel thanks to international airlines. In the World Health Report of 2007, WHO director Dr. Margaret Chan wrote of a disease situation that was “anything but stable.” New diseases are increasing at the historically unprecedented rate of one per year. “Airlines,” Chan wrote, “now carry more than two billion passengers annually, vastly increasing opportunities for the rapid international spread of infectious agents and their vectors.”