Some interesting technology for toilets in areas without running water:
You can’t legislate behavior and fixing bad habits takes more than an intellectual comprehension.
I’m sure India looks at American problems of obesity and heart disease and thinks “Duh! Just quit eating the cows! Even if you don’t care that they’re sacred animals, can’t you people read medical research?”
If only there were something like designated shitting streets.
Wow. If people are NIMBYs about cell towers and halfway houses…
One of the most fascinating things I’ve ever read was an old Peace Corps manual on building improved toilets in different regions. Just in terms of structure, there are numerous factors- climate, soil type, prevalence of flies, attitudes toward using waste as fertilizer, etc. all kinds of ingenious designs have popped up, but most of them are well suited for extremely specific circumstances. You can’t just do a one-size fits all thing. Each region has different needs and expectations.
More complicated is placing toilets. How do you make sure women are safe using them? Often women don’t want to be seen going to the toilets, but at the same time concealing them can create safety issues. How do you make sure that the poorest people (who likely aren’t attending your public planning sessions) have access? How do you place them within a useable distance from where people live? Are kids going to be able to use them alone? These aren’t insurmountable questions, but they take more time and expense than your average toilet-building program is able to spend. You need to take the time to know a community, and that’s expensive.
Above all, how do you maintain them? Even in the US, public toilets are often unusably gross. Latrines need regular, labor-intensive, unpleasant maintenance. Without some kind of civic structure in place to keep them up, they will quickly become unusable. And setting up a sustainable civic organization is not simple. Local politics is almost always messy, and may be impossible for outsiders to navigate. Even when you give it your best, there are no guarantees. Local civic organizations fall apart regularly.
Indeed. Even if you install toilets everywhere the effluent needs to be collected and piped somewhere, preferably to a treatment facility as opposed to the local stream. This is part of basic infrastructure that includes clean, treated water, which is also lacking in most of India. All of this is going to be expensive to build in the first place, let alone the ongoing maintenance and upkeep - hard to fund if it is not really a priority for the local communities.
In China, I saw villages that had a central public shitter, up a few steps to a platform. Beneath it was a catch bucket, and every night, someone would go around and collect the bucket, to use to fertilize the fields. Nothing is wasted in China, where the population produces a half a million tons of human shit a day, aka fertilizer.
Another place in China, in a rural bus-stop roadhouse, there was a toilet in an outbuilding. Everyone squatted against a wall, with a trough beneath it. You could hear hogs on the other side of the wall, gobbling up the shit. Yes, the restaurant served excellent pork. Nothing is wasted in China.
Haha. And don’t forget black people is this country think they have it bad. They should try out a country in south east asia or japan. Most Chinease, Japanese, Vietnamese fucking HATE black people.
The use of human waste as fertilizer is one of those tricky things to navigate.
Areas with a tradition of using “night soil” will reject options that don’t allow for it. The fertilizer itself is valuable, and probably more importantly, the collection and distribution networks are an important part of the economy and often provide much-needed jobs for the poorest of the poor.
Ares that don’t have a tradition of using human waste as fertilizer generally won’t change to accept it. They generally find the idea repulsive, and they don’t have and are unlikely to develop distribution networks. It’s not something that is going to catch on, no matter how sensible it seems in the abstract.
There are some really cool latrine designs out there. Human waste is safe for general use as a fertilizer after fermenting for a year (this is why China, which uses it directly, almost always cooks vegetables on high heat). There are double chambered latrines that let one chamber ferment while the other is in use. It’s pretty brilliant.
But it’s useless in a place that won’t use it.
Correction- it seems that excrement should be composted 1.5-2 years before use.
That must be among the most surprising facts I’ve learned here. I mean, the privacy part I can totally see as a learned behavior, but I am truly amazed that we, as humans, don’t sort of view waste as , I don’t know, “dangerous” or something. I think it was here that I learned that urine is not harmful, but aren’t a great number of diseases caused by feces infected water / food? Surely even folks with no knowledge of Western medicine should have connected the dots? Eep. Ignorance fought indeed.
Just don’t travel to India and get drunk. You don’t want to be found in the street all shitfaced.
If people use it too early, do they usually have to do a compost-mortem?
Yeah, that was a pretty shitty joke. Even so, I think it is the #2 best joke on the thread so far, which I will admit isn’t actually a lot because the thread went into the toilet so quickly.
I spent six months traveling in India.
Train tracks seem to be the “go to” spot for defecation. As my train passed by an area, there would often be people squatting on the other set of tracks. And on the train itself, the toilet would just be a hole in the floor that one squatted over.
I stayed with a family in Goa for a few weeks. It was a beautiful old home built when it was a Portuguese colony. However, there was no indoor plumbing. You just threw a pail on a rope down into the well in the backyard to get water.
The first morning there, I got up and headed to the backyard where I was told there was an out house. As I opened the back door (and to my surprise) a large pig greeted me enthusiastically. The out house was raised about 4 feet off the ground and had a ramp leading up to the door. As I sat down, I spied the pig directly below me. I told the pig that that was probably a really bad place to stand, but he didn’t move. In fact he gobbled down every thing I dropped down to him. The pig must have also defecated in the rather small back yard, but there was no smell at all. The pig also served as a garbage disposal for any food waste from the kitchen.
I just made sure not to order any pork at any of the local restaurants.
Yes, a lot of diseases and parasites are spread by feces. Societies that have waste taboos resulting in waste isolation tend to have less of that so they might prosper better than societies without, but even in the “enlightened west” connecting the dots was fairly recent, in the 1850’s more or less. The palace of Versailles was known for having human waste deposits randomly distributed throughout.
People would put shit and piss “over there” or in a chamber pot because they found the smell objectionable and/or didn’t want stains on floors/carpets/etc, but not out of any awareness of them being possible disease vectors.
One theory is that when humanity was exclusively nomadic hunter-gatherers we didn’t stay in one spot very long and left our waste (and its possible germs and parasites) behind in old campsites on a regular basis. With a much lower population crowd diseases didn’t exist yet so the feces had less disease burden than that of a Medieval townsman’s. There was no need to evolve innate bathroom taboos.
There is also the possibility that, in primordial times when we all lived in Africa, local varieties of dung beetles would perform clean-up on human shit as they do on ruminant and other dung left behind by animals but when we moved to other continents that disposal system was absent.
The fact there are great variances in bathroom habits and customs worldwide is another indication there are not innate practices involved. Modern hunter-gatherers in Africa in the 20th Century (probably though not proven to be closest to the original customs of humanity) might designate a spot adjacent to the campsite as a “latrine”, which was still basically taking a shit in a field, but that’s mainly because people don’t want to walk through shit and hunters don’t want it on them because their prey might smell it. There was no concept of modern sanitation.
No. The fact that filth causes disease has been well known for millennia, humans are not as stupid as you like to think. What was discovered was:
i) The cause; in short germs
ii) And more importantly, what seems to be clean may not be. When John Snow made his celebrated investigations of the Soho water pump in 1854, he came to the conclusion that the water was the cause , not by examination of the water- the science of the day, which was pretty advanced, was unable to see anything in analysis; but by proving that pretty much everyone who had fallen sick in Broad Street had used that pump.
Of course it gets more complicated then that; if you live in a place, you will have a level of immunity to local pathogens, which outsider’s won’t. This is the real reason why travellers fall sick, no immunity to local strains; which is why you can fall sick in a different city in your own country and why even travellers to developed areas fall sick.
You ever heard or (eew) seen the pix some moms will post on Facebook or Mommy boards of their toddlers creative endeavors with the contents of their diapers? Everything from poo smeared “drawings” on crib side walls to kids knee deep in their own waste.
Also, not all urine is sterile. Not just the tiny bit that sits near the end of the urethra of everyone (which is why you are supposed to pee before having sex) but some people have truly awful urine. There are various bacteria that thrive in urine such as Klebsiella_pneumoniae. And fungus, protozoans and parasites can also be found in urine.
The issue here is population density. Open dedication is a workable strategy in sparsely populated rural areas. With plenty of space and relatively little waste, the risk of contamination is minimal and the effort it’d take to engage in more sophisticated waste management would be better spent elsewhere.
In denser places, where living space and water sources are closer and where the volume of waste is too high to break down naturally, you get problems. But it’s hard to get people to change strategies that they see as having been successful for generations, and the development or urban infrastructure serving the very poor is inherently challenging.
We do; that’s why it smells bad. Nobody wants to step in it or smell it or live next to it. But it takes a degree of intellect/strategizing/planning/foresight to say “hey, you know, we should put all of our shit in one carefully managed pile over there, instead of scattering it all around town in the open.”