"Taboo of poo" blocking progress on global sanitation crisis:

Space Daily ^ | March 17, 2003

[cogitator]

Tear down selected areas of shacks for communal latrines. Burn the waste with diesel or kerosene. Bury it, pour lime on it, compost it, generate methane with it, anything but live with it flowing down the street or stream.

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)!

[cogitator]

How is something that has been taking place since the beginning of human existance(pooping in the woods/fields) a 'crisis'?

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?

[camle]

now that stinks!

[Blackyce]

Because there's a sh't load of us, and we live in concentratred areas.