Posted on 03/17/2003 7:36:36 AM PST by cogitator
"Taboo of poo" blocking progress on global sanitation crisis: Kyoto forum
[slightly edited]
KYOTO, Japan (AFP) Mar 17, 2003
Embarrassment and inhibitions over discussing human waste is one of the prime obstacles to resolving the global sanitation crisis, experts gathered at the Third World Water Forum said here Monday.
Ensuring access to fresh water for 1.4 billion people is dominating discussions at the forum gathering 10,000 participants from 165 countries, but equally important is what to do with the waste generated by six billion people worldwide.
Only one billion people use flush toilets that are connected to sewage systems.
Another 2.8 billion people use pit latrines, but "there is a huge fraction of the planet -- 2.4 billion people -- that has no place to go and sh*t," said Doctor Jamie Bartram, the coordinator of water, sanitation and health for the World Health Organization.
Pathogens and parasites that breed in human waste quickly contaminate ground and surface water supplies if feces are not disposed of properly, causing illnesses that result in the deaths of as many as two million children annually, said Carol Bellamy, the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund.
Waste is also a major source of pollution; in India, for example, 70 percent of the river pollution is a direct result of human waste.
But the "psychology of excrement" inhibits real and effective solutions from being discussed on a local, national or global level, said Arno Rosemarin of the Stockholm Environment Institute, a non-governmental organization that is one of the key innovators in ecological sanitation research.
"We are entrenched in a global sanitation crisis but no one knows how to talk about it," he said.
Countries such as India and those in the "Victorian" west should take their cue from China, he said, which is "fearless" in discussing how to deal with its "horrible" sewage systems and using human excrement as an agricultural fertilizer.
"Until we can discuss sh*t and p*ss without squirming or giggling, we will not resolve this crisis," said Rosemarin. "Everybody's going to be downstream from someone else real soon."
Central to UN plans to halve the number of people without access to sanitation by 2015 are awareness campaigns, including the WASH initiative by the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council that uses posters, stickers and television ads to remind people to wash their hands after using the toilet.
Low-cost, smart toilets are also making inroads in both developed and developing nations.
El Salvador and Mozambique use flush-free earth toilets that produce rich fertilizers, while Sweden and Norway are installing hundreds of dry toilets with urine diversion in public buildings and private homes.
For island nations, the need for effective and low-impact sanitation is particularly pressing as their fragile coastal ecosystems and marginalized economies cannot support massive sewage systems.
But "cultural sensitivities about sanitation are much more of a challenge than technology issues," said Clive Carpenter, the head of water resources for the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission.
Composting toilets might be the "panacea" for the sanitation problems in the South Pacific, but accepting them as an alternative to gleaming white porcelain toilet bowls will take time, he said.
"Any attempt to introduce alternative sanitation must first be preceded, or at the very least accompanied by, a massive effort in community awareness," he said. "There is a major need to move beyond the taboo of poo."
Some (not all) of what you suggest still costs money; money that many of these people who are trying to get their next meal don't have. As you say, it's hard to relate to existence where everything goes just to get to the next day.
It doesn't sound like an insurmountable problem that requires first-world monies to solve.
A real sanitation system would. The article does refer to lower-tech solutions that appear to work and also generate useful by-products, such as agricultural fertilizer. It would seem (to me) that the best way to attack the problem is to go for easy-to-implement, low-tech solutions first. Living as we are with three toddlers, I know that quite a bit of useful clean water is getting flushed in our household (hopefully they'll get past this fascination-with-flushing stage soon)!
It's the number of people doing it, and where they are doing it. Not necessarily in the woods and fields; more like in the same gutter that flows by the front door of their next 10 next-door neighbors.
And they also drink from that same gutter. Would that be a crisis for you?
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