Ecological Sanitation

"The world can't sustain this toilet"

If you are, one of the millions who tends to 'flush and forget' on a regular basis, chances are you're dumping up to 22 liters of drinkable water every day, one three- to six-liter flush at a time.

But the problem doesn't stop there. What follows — the 'forget' part of the toilet experience — is the long and costly process of sanitizing the water that was clean before you answered nature's call.

In the developed world, the flush toilet is our only direct link to the enormous — and exorbitant — engineering feat that is the modern urban sanitation system: the sewers, filtration plants, water treatment facilities, and finally, treated water disposal channels that send the scrubbed water into our rivers and lakes.  

Using so much water per flush unnecessarily increases the volume of our waste and the cost of its transportation and treatment, ecologists say.

If you don't put waste in water in the first place, then you don't have to spend money to remove it at the back end. 

The process also leaves a huge carbon footprint, says Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters. In the UK, she says, "the sewage system uses as much energy as what the largest coal fire station in the [country] produces" — about 28.8 million tones of carbon dioxide a year.  

But the fundamental shift in how we think about our waste, and by extension, dispose of it, needs to be to stop mixing liquids and solids, says the WTO's Sim. "The human body is designed to separate solids from liquid waste," and we should follow suit, he says. By separating fecal matter from urine at the source in what's called a "urine diversion toilet," a wider ecological system of waste disposal becomes possible. Solids can be composted for fertilizer and harvested for methane gas. Urine can be used to produce phosphorous and nitrogen and clean, drinkable water.

Ecological sanitation, as this call to arms is known in toilet circles, is already up and running in many spots around the world. In rural China, 15.4 million homes convert methane into power from what normally went down the pit behind the house. Household waste is stored in a state-subsidized "digester," a kind of metal stomach that breaks down the matter and releases methane gas which is trapped for reuse. In the French city of Lille, a small fleet of ten buses are also using methane, gleaned from the city's poop. And in some Indian villages, simple latrines have been built that separate waste and use it to produce compost and fertilizer at a per capita cost infinitesimally lower than any waste management budget in the West.