Photo: Peepoople.
Going to the toilet is an easy thing in this part of the world. Your flush and – it’s gone. In many places globally, though, it’s a different business. Four out of ten persons on the globe haven’t got a toilet and in slum areas the absence of sanitation is a huge problem, causing diseases and deaths.
Thanks to a small plastic bag this can now be changed. The idea for the Peepoo bag comes from the architect Anders Wilhemson, who has developed this “personal single use toilet”. The bag contains urea, which reacts with the excrement and after 2-4 weeks all pathogens have been inactivated.
Good fertilizer
The bag will be affordable, costing about 6 cents of a US dollar, but one other big advantage is that after the dangerous bacteria have died, the bags and their contents can be used as fertilizer in people’s garden plots, helping to grow their food. The bag, which makes its contents stay odorless for 24 hours, is also biodegradable. Next step is finding a way to produce it without using fossil fuels, which today is needed as material for the bag.
Haiti next stop
The Peepoo bag has been tried out in slums in India, Kenya and Bangladesh. It will be especially useful in schools, where the lack of safe toilets makes many girls quit school when they have reached puberty. Now the bags will also be introduced in Haiti, where the earthquake has made sanitation a problem.
Criticism towards the water toilet
In an article in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter Anders Wilhelmson says his next project might be the toilets of the West. The water closets we use in this part of the world certainly aren’t the most sustainable ones. Using good water (at least here in Sweden mainly drinking water is used) to flush down our excrement is definitely wasteful. And according to Wilhelmson only ten percent of the sewage in the world is actually treated properly.
