The Big Necessity – Cannonball Read #33

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George

In a world increasingly concerned with both sanitation and impending shortages of fresh water the developed world can no longer afford to turn its nose up at alternate solutions to the removal of shit. Poop is a problem. In the developed world we freak out when a single shipment of ground beef or organic spinach is contaminated with e. coli. Most of the world doesn’t experience a day without waste contaminating what they ingest.  When experts talk about water related problems and access to clean drinking water what they are really talking about are shit problems and the fact that most people are literally shitting where they eat.

The author traveled the world and examines how different societies interact with excrement. She describes the incredibly high tech world of Japanese toilets as well as the countryside of India where most people don’t even have a pit latrine.  The range of methods of disposal is mind boggling. What is clear is how important the toilet and modern sewers are to the development of the first world. It is also clear how desperately the third world needs to develop sustainable means of sequestering human effluvia.

Pretoilet systems of waste disposal leveraged the uses of human-ure and created a complete cycle that ensured that waste wasn’t wasted. In China, human-ure is still used in vast quantities as fertilizer. Biosolids – the term for the treated waste from a sewage plants – are used to fertilize crops in the US. Neither the Chinese nor the US products are necessarily processed to the level that would render them safe to be used around people. There are plants that make biosolids safe enough to let your kids roll around in it but those plants are few and far between.

The flush toilet is one of the greatest inventions of all time but is still problematic because of its inefficiency. Because of our skittishness about human waste we refuse to see the potential in our poop. We need to get it out of sight as quickly and painlessly as possible. Even if that means using enough water to keep a person alive for a week every time we flush.  In countries like India it is simply not feasible to waste that much potable water. Sanitation efforts in developing nations are focused on latrines that use either no water or a bare minimum.

In especially impoverished rural areas, biogas digesters are popular. They combine human and livestock excrement and create usable biosolids as well as bio-gas. This gas can be used for heating, cooking and lighting. This reduces cooking time for food and the amount of time spent finding fuel for cook fires. It also reduces smoke inhalation damage and opens opportunities to pursue income generating activities for rural women. It is women’s liberation borne of a mixture of human and pig shit.

Activist efforts in the Indian countryside are focusing on educating villagers about the danger of just copping a squat. They are successful in effecting cultural change, creating towns where it is no longer acceptable to not use a latrine. Their pace is slow however, as they are converting perhaps 100-500 people at a time in a country of over 1,000,000,000. The focus in India is on creating profit generating enterprises that  provide sanitation at a feasible cost for the poor. This is a delicate balancing act as sometimes it takes a village to afford a latrine.

The day is coming when we are all going to be affected by the problems surrounding poop. This book was an education. I will never again take the cleanliness of my drinking water or my bottom for granted.

-fh