We’ve got a lot of ways to go: Thoughts on World Toilet Day

“Hey, what are you working on?” a colleague asked me last week.

“A story on World Toilet Day,” I said.

My colleague thought I was kidding.

But this is not a joke. There truly is a World Toilet Day — and its goal is not to boost loo sales. Rather the U.N. declared the day in 2013 to promote public health and “raise awareness about the lack of access to safe sanitation and toilets for billions of people worldwide.” 

At a time when toilets can heat their seats, spray your butt with water and I dunno probably play songs like “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” how can so many people be “toilet insecure”? In fact 3.6 billion people have no potty at home and no easy access to affordable public toilets (which often charge a usage fee). What’s more, a joint report by WHO and UNICEF says 673 million people engage in open defecation, delicately defined as “squatting outdoors.”

Then there’s the so-called a “flying toilet” — a euphemism for defecating in a plastic bag or container of some sort and then tossing the container, feces and all, to get rid of it.

(Flying toilets are often associated with the world’s impoverished neighborhoods. But they’re not a modern invention. Hope Randall, a spokeswoman for the Defeat Diarrheal Disease (DefeatDD) Initiative at the health nonprofit PATH, was just in Scotland for a conference and learned that back in the Middle Ages, Scots did it. Only they had to use buckets for the fecal fling because of plastic not being invented yet.)

The world’s dramatic lack of toilets means that people suffer a loss of privacy and dignity. But there’s a huge public health consequence as well. Human feces are rich in pathogens. When fecal matter infiltrates the soil, children who play in the dirt can come in contact with it. And when it enters the water stream, that’s a recipe for disease spread.

Fecal contamination is not just a problem for lower-income countries where sanitation systems may be weak or non-existent. Catastrophic floods from heavy rains and hurricanes can bring the same result in any corner of Earth. This summer, for example, various Florida health departments issued warnings about fecal contamination in a number of beaches. The Naples Daily News reported: “Swimming is not recommended because bacteria from street flooding and storm surge can be carried back into the Gulf after flooding recedes.”

In addition to the health repercussions, the lack of toilets has other consequences. Jane Otai, who does public health research in Nairobi, Kenya, says that when schools lack safe and sanitary toilets, girls who are on their period may stay home since there is nowhere to go to address menstrual needs. And at a time when Kenya is reporting a disturbing trend of attacks on women, Otai notes that seeking a public toilet after dark can put a woman at risk.

What’s the solution?

I put that question to Sasha Kramer, executive director of SOIL Haiti, a group that seeks to bring toilets to families in Haiti who have none.

Now let’s say there was a job called “World Toilet Czar” and you got it, I said to her. What next?

For starters, her agenda would be … well, let’s say bureaucratic. In Haiti, where her organization works, she says there is no government budget line for sanitation. So as toilet czar, she would want every country to have a) a sanitation budget line and b) ample funds to provide safe and sanitary toilets.

Because it shouldn’t be up to the private sector to make sanitation work, Kramer believes — that would likely exacerbate the divide between the toilet haves and the toilet have-nots, in her view.

The work of SOIL is connected to another big discussion point in the world of toilets. Human fecal matter can be … hmm, let’s say “harvested” … and turned into something of value.

Nutrients we consume come out in the end, says Kramer. Certain elements in human poop — like nitrogen — make it an effective fertilizer. In SOIL’s Haiti project, 3,200 families were given a special toilet. It’s not connected to a sewage system. When a person poops, the feces goes into into a 5-gallon container, where it’s mixed with ground-up plant matter left over from the harvesting of sugar cane, creating what locals call “une bonne odeur” — a good aroma!

Once a week, SOIL collects the poop, which is then slow cooked — 122 degrees Fahrenheit for 7 days — to wipe out pathogens without disturbing beneficial nutrients. And voila — fertilizer! The end product, says Kramer, is sold and/or donated to farmer collectives and agricultural and reforestation projects and also sold by the bag in stores.

The cost to the family for the toilet and poop pickup services: about $2.50 a month.

In other projects to turn poop into a precious commodity, human waste — aka “biosolids” — is being used as an ingredient to make bricks.

It’ll take some doing to scale up these kinds of projects and to figure out what kinds of toilets work best in what parts of the world.

“It can’t be one system fits all,” says Kellogg Schwab, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who specializes in wastewater contaminants. “Our societies have developed different cultural approaches to defecation and urination.”

And finding the right systems for various places requires talking about the problem. Only people don’t necessarily want to discuss toilets (unless they’re the Property Brothers doing a bathroom reno). So a goofy-sounding event like “World Toilet Day” can perhaps bring attention to the troubling lack of toilets, say the commode campaigners I interviewed.

“Toilets have a PR problem. And we’ve long known that the squeamishness in talking about these things has held back progress,” says Randall. “So I’m thankful for the opportunity to elevate these issues.”

To mark the august occasion of World Toilet Day, we asked the photographers of The Everyday Projects, a global group, to share images of toilets. The pictures might make you laugh — you know, toilet humor! And maybe they’ll make you think, too, about how lucky we are to have toilets … and how we need to make sure everyone on Earth is similarly flush.