The Race to Find a Cheaper, Healthier Toilet

Over the past few years, the race to save lives in the developing world -- by inventing a cheaper, cleaner toilet -- has welcomed a whole new class of sprinters. There's Singapore's Rigel Technology, which has invented a $30 toilet that separates liquid and solid waste, turning the latter into compost. There's Sulabh International, an Indian nonprofit that's marketing a toilet that (in a twist of ingenuity) actually creates biogas from human excrement, which in turn can be used for cooking.

Now, a new contender has entered the race. It goes by a somewhat ungainly moniker, but one that's decidedly to the point: the PeePoo bag.

The inspiration behind the invention was a phenomenon frequently seen in urban slums, one known as a "flyaway toilet" or a "helicopter toilet" -- plastic bags used as a receptacle for excrement, which are then disposed of by tossing them away. (Which, for example, are getting particularly wide use in Haiti, where the majority of the displaced still lack access to latrines.) The PeePoo product capitalizes on the concept, but because the bag is biodegradable, it can be knotted and buried underground, where urea crystals will break the waste down into fertilizer.

It might not be a glamorous patent to file, but these kinds of inventions are critical.

Around the world, over 2.6 billion people are living without toilets, a public health crisis that forces people around the world to defecate in public, contaminating both food and drinking water. Consider one fact presented by Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters: a single gram of feces can contain 10 million viruses and 100 worm eggs. The average person living without sanitation might consume up to 10 grams of fecal matter a day -- a fact that fuels fatal outbreaks of diarrhea around the world. In fact, as George notes, fully 80% of the world's illnesses are caused by fecal matter.

The PeePoo bag's Swedish inventor, Anders Wilhelmson, hopes to sell the bags for $0.02 -- about the cost of an ordinary plastic bag, says the New York Times. After pilot efforts in Kenya and India, Wilhelmson plans to start mass-producing the bag this summer.

Memo to Tarō Gomi, author of the much-beloved children's book, Everybody Poops. Maybe it's time for an updated edition -- one that can help raise awareness about the title's fatal corollary: that around the world, not everyone has a place to go.

Photo Credit: Mr. T in DC