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Comments: 413 + - Science: Disposable Toilet To Change the World on Monday March 08, @03:39PM
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samzenpus
on Monday March 08, @03:39PM
from the sunshine-in-a-bag dept.
from the sunshine-in-a-bag dept.
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earth
captn ecks writes "A biodegradable and self-sterilizing bag for people of the toilet-disenfranchised world (40% of humankind) to dispose of their bodily waste and turn it into safe fertilizer has been created by a Swedish entrepreneur. It's a dead simple and brilliant solution to a vexing problem. From the article: 'Once used, the bag can be knotted and buried, and a layer of urea crystals breaks down the waste into fertilizer, killing off disease-producing pathogens found in feces. The bag, called the Peepoo, is the brainchild of Anders Wilhelmson, an architect and professor in Stockholm. “Not only is it sanitary,” said Mr. Wilhelmson, who has patented the bag, “they can reuse this to grow crops.”'"
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When you see it (Score:5, Funny)
You'll sh*t bricks!
Named and Marketed by the Same People... (Score:5, Insightful)
...who brought you "The Gimp." Another great product no self-respecting adult will ever ask for by name.
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Re:Named and Marketed by the Same People... (Score:4, Funny)
Thought it would have been brought to you by the people who gave you Wii..
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Great for 1st world situations too... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Great for 1st world situations too... (Score:5, Funny)
Um, in most places in America, the mere act of whipping out your wang to wizz in public can get you on a certain government list you can't ever get removed from...
You mean the infamous No Fly [wikipedia.org] List?
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Re:Great for 1st world situations too... (Score:5, Insightful)
For that list, you name just needs to sound a certain way.... or if you befriend a certain invisible friend who for some reason has a bad reputation with some people who have a different invisible friend who they think is better, but is actually the same guy (or whatever). It does not make sense, but you have to have faith or you will sent to a special bad place, that exists some where under ground...
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Re:Great for 1st world situations too... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Great for 1st world situations too... (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds to me like you're going down in either case...
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Not to be a naysayer, but can people afford this? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're a poor peasant living in some place where they don't even have toilets, can you really afford bags to poo in? Chances are food and fuel are more important to you.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
it's for URBAN areas where people already crap in plastic bags and throw them helicopter style, this addresses the sanitation/disease problem.
Re:Not to be a naysayer, but can people afford thi (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Not to be a naysayer, but can people afford thi (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article: "He also found that slum dwellers there collected their excrement in a plastic bag and disposed of it by flinging it He plans to sell it for about 2 or 3 cents — comparable to the cost of an ordinary plastic bag."
Bagged poo flinging?! Hey, when you're poor you have to get your entertainment any way you can.
If I was poor I'd carry my poo-bag on a stick like a hobo. Then I'd use the stick as a make-shift treb-poo-chet to launch it at some rich bastards house.
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Shit provides both food and fuel (Score:5, Interesting)
e.g.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=methane+digester [youtube.com]
You get methane which can be burned as fuel and the digestate is high in nitrogen, phosphorus and calcium.
Alternatively, lower tech without the gas tight fittings, drop the methane capture idea and use a dry toilet. It's more a matter of education and organisation than anything else.
I'll just point out that by not doing this in the west, we are effectively extracting phosphorus, nitrogen and calcium from our fields and pumping it into rivers and oceans. We then burn a load of fuel to dig up more phosphorus and calcium elsewhere and burn natural gas to produce nitrates to put back on the fields. It's dumb.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They may already use bags like this, but they certainly aren't buying them at the market for that purpose. These are the kinds of places where people live on half a dollar per day. No poor person is going to devote 6% of their income to crapping. They'll reuse an old bag if they can find one, but barring that, they're just going to take a dump on the ground or dig a small hole.
So buy the full bags (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a business opportunity here.
A traditional "helicopter toilet" is a problem; it's shit stored in a non-degradable bag. Separating the shit from the bag to make fertilizer is non-viable (for a number of reasons) So it is hazardous waste.
But a load in this bag is quite literally a unit of fertilizer. Not immediately (there is processing time involved) but eventually that bag of shit is going to have a value.
Work out that value, subtract the cost of the bag, storage and handling costs, etc - and then give away the bags and pay people for full ones.
Not only do you encourage the use of the bags (a net benefit to hygiene) you inject money into the local economy and you make a profit - while helping improve the food supply.
Put another way:
1. Give away bags
2. Buy full bags
3. Store full bags until they become viable fertilizer
4. Sell fertilizer
5. Profit!!!
DG
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Re:Not to be a naysayer, but can people afford thi (Score:5, Insightful)
"What these people real need is a stable government and economic growth", and population control. I mean, come on. A guy can't afford a can of beans to share with his special other, but they can fuck all night long for years, creating more mouths to feed. Most Americans can't imagine the poverty in some of this world's cities - but no matter how poor, there is always a ready supply of babies.
The human is an amazing animal. He shares some characteristics with the rats and cockroaches.
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Re:Not to be a naysayer, but can people afford thi (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree on the merits of population control, but in a society where the primary thing is agriculture, rather than manufacturing or other industrialized stuff, one's family's productivity tends to scale with the number of hands one can produce capable of tending crops (or herds or what-have-you). Moreover, the presence of diseases, poor medical facilities, and other factors contribute heavily to child death rates, and thus being able to make more of them is a way to ensure the genetic line goes on.
Clearly, making so many that none can eat is a poor idea, but so is making too few and being unable to harvest enough food to feed the family. Simiarly, you'd feel pretty shitty if your only kid (and co-laborer) went and broke his leg, or blew it off in a land mine, or died of AIDS, or got bit by a snake, or killed by a neighboring group of people.
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Re:Not to be a naysayer, but can people afford thi (Score:5, Insightful)
Economic growth and stable governments providing strong social safety nets are population control. Not of the mandatory, authoritarian kind, but there the one thing that has consistently led to declining family sizes in human history, because they are the things that stop people from investing in creating children as a form of old-age support.
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Re:Not to be a naysayer, but can people afford thi (Score:4, Insightful)
You'd be best to keep wildlife off of your field, should they eat your crops before you harvest.
It's not humanly possible to do even in the USA. The fences around fields are just to mark property lines and hold cattle. Deer jump over the fences with ease, and coyotes crawl under, and wild pigs just go straight through.
Also not all wildlife is damaging your interests. A deer isn't going to eat much grass, compared to your 100 cows, and if you want you can eat the deer when it gets fat enough :-) If you are a farmer, coyotes and foxes aren't going to eat your alfalfa.
Fecal matter alone does not make the best Fertilizer - combining it with certain chemicals does.
The soil contains chemicals, water, bacteria, plants and small animals (worms, insects) to do that work for you. This is hardly a new discovery. Chemicals in a bag are needed only because of the bag. Perhaps they are an improvement, but one that isn't worth 3 cents or even 0.03 cents to a farmer. A city dweller might benefit from that improvement, though - if he cares (big if.)
Also, crapping on a carrot doesn't mean it'll grow bigger, it means you just infested it with waste that often carries diseases.
That's not exactly how it works. Fields are often fertilized with manure, and plants grow bigger on those nutrients. Plants's cells are pretty good on separating good and bad materials. Contamination is occurring primarily during the harvest, when bacteria are placed directly onto the produce. In any case, as I mentioned there are thousands of wild animals at or above your field, and you can't do anything about them. Typically they are not a health problem. But you are expected to carefully wash the produce anyway; that's the step that was probably missing in those recent contamination stories in the news.
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The guy creates a brilliant solution... (Score:5, Funny)
This is quite unfortunate... (Score:5, Funny)
Too bad for Nintendo as I hear Peepoo was supposed to be the name of their next gen console. It actually works with their current naming scheme too. Wii (We) Peepoo (People).
Complex problem, simple solution. (Score:3, Insightful)
Occam's Razor at work. Much respect to Mr. Wilhelmson.
Re:Complex problem, simple solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
A recurring cost revenue model for using the toilet is not exactly what I would call a "simple solution." Especially not for people who can't even afford a toilet today.
Now proper fecal composting, THAT'S a simple solution... and damned near free, too. Hell, if you do it right, it's not even supposed to smell.
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Re:Complex problem, simple solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're just not looking at the problem the right way. This is a simple solution to the problem of "how to get paid every time a poor person takes a dump". It's the pinnacle of capitalist science, really.. a major achievement. It's all downhill from here, folks. This man has successfully applied the razor and blades model to human existence: free human, $0.02 per poop for the rest of his life. Let no one claim that western civilization never accomplished anything.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Except you could probably just pour urea crystals into a cesspool and get largely the same effect, without the expense of the bags.
A single bag is 2-3 cents. Assuming you only use it for feces, you're going to use at least one of these a day. A village of 100 people is going to go through $3 a day in these, and on that kind of money you could feed six of them.
I'm not saying this is a bad idea, only that it appears to be an overengineered one.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Occam's Razor does not have to do with solutions, it has to do with chosing a hypothesis.
But yeah, I salute a simple solution. And hope that it also works... :-)
Perfect for those really long WoW raids. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Perfect for those really long WoW raids. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Perfect for those really long WoW raids. (Score:4, Funny)
Not to mention, how the heck do you poop in a bottle in the first place? Thread it up your ass and squeeze? Yowza...
(given that it would add pressure to the bottle, I can then imagine it all squeezing back out once you removed it from your nether regions too...)
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The Humanure Handbook (Score:5, Informative)
Joseph Jenkins --author of the Humanure Handbook-- has been doing this for close to thirty years. His concept also has the benefit of being patent free and simpler. Look see here:http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/humanure.html
All you need is a 5 gallon bucket, some cover material (rice hulls, sawdust, shredded newspaper, or coffee grounds), and teensy bit of brain power.
You can get the book on Amazon or download it for free from his site: http://humanurehandbook.com/downloads/Humanure_Handbook_all.pdf [humanurehandbook.com]
cost (Score:5, Informative)
The most important factor is cost. It will have to be fantastically cheap to manufacture and distribute this if you want to sell it to people who subsist on $0.10 of rice per day. People who are used to flinging poo out the windows of their shacks will probably be perplexed by the idea of paying to take a dump.
And yes, I have dodged chamber pots in India. Prepare to be depressed if you ever visit the third world :-/
Re:cost (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't have to be free, it just has to pay for itself.
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Re:cost (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA: "He plans to sell it for about 2 or 3 cents -- comparable to the cost of an ordinary plastic bag."
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Re:cost (Score:5, Informative)
See my above post. I was in a hurry to write before, but now I have a few minutes to elaborate.
Using Mr. Jenkin's humanure method, one only needs a small bucket and clean cover material; all things that should be available locally. The humanure toilet can be kept indoors with no smell or chance of spreading any disease. After one year you will have a nice small compost pile that you can use on your food crops. No need to ship in bags or pay any patent royalties.
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Why don't they build themselves a sewer system (Score:5, Interesting)
What I don't get is, why doesn't Kenya and all these other 3rd world countries build a real sewer system? It's not rocket science; the Romans did it over 2000 years ago using nothing but hand tools, rocks and some volcanic cement. Yes it was labor intensive, but AFAIK labor shortage isn't a problem in most 3rd world countries, is it? Besides they should be able to get access to some heavy diesel equipment on loan through UNICEF or World Bank or some such organization.
Re:Why don't they build themselves a sewer system (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't get is, why doesn't Kenya and all these other 3rd world countries build a real sewer system?
Corruption.
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Re:Why don't they build themselves a sewer system (Score:5, Insightful)
A couple of issues: First is often water supply. If you don't have a reasonable water supply, it's hard to build a complex sewer system which relies on water flow. If you're trying to compost things, that's a bit easier in this respect but this leads to the other major problem: Civil planning and infrastructure. It's pretty easy to make a composting toilet / latrine / whatever for low population density places. It's hard to do so for shanty towns which tend to have a high population density and very low ability to plan major projects.
You just don't build a sewer system. It takes lots of planning - remember shit flows downhill. You really, really want the downhill to be the correct one. It doesn't work if a bunch of squatters starts digging a hole to dump their waste on the next group of squatters. You need engineers, surveyors, the ability to determine property lines, etc.
Certainly this isn't rocket science and if the local warlords quit trying to rape the countryside for their own gains all of the time, you could imagine it getting done, but it just doesn't seem to happen much. Functioning civil governance is often taken for granted. It shouldn't be.
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Re:Why don't they build themselves a sewer system (Score:4, Interesting)
why doesn't Kenya and all these other 3rd world countries build a real sewer system?
Way to wait till someone invents a simple solution, to come up with an even simpler solution!
Also... I heard that a lot of people don't even have bread to eat. Why don't they just eat cake?
"Why don't they just" is a good solution to having the poor pull themselves up out of poverty by their bootstraps, but there are a lot of interrelated problems keeping them down, that need to be solved first (or simultaneously) in order to allow building infrastructure to pay off. It's worth trying to tackle, I think, but I also think that a few thousand dollars worth of bags that turn disease-producing waste into fertilizer would go a LOT further than the same money spent on heavy diesel equipment.
Also keep in mind that much of rural north america isn't fit with a sewer system, and if it's not feasible here it certainly isn't in rural parts of the third world. A sewer system isn't a solution for all parts of the world.
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Hmmm.... (Score:5, Funny)
I think it's a nice solution (Score:3, Informative)
I'm really glad to see that someone found a way to make human waste safe for crops.
That has been a big issue in general for farmers in countries where there are less than adequate water safety facilities.
It's hard to afford fertilizer in war-torn or otherwise de-stabilized countries when you have a bunch of kids to feed.
Perhaps a buy one donate several model? (Score:5, Interesting)
Finally get those kids off jenkem (Score:4, Funny)
Could also be used after earthquakes or tornadoes (Score:4, Interesting)
Baby wipes or similar disposable disinfectant wipes could be used to clean the person's hands afterwards, if no working water faucet is available. I sometimes use a baby wipe for my hands after using a Clivus Multrum composting toilet or an old pit toilet in the national forest, where no running water is available. I usually keep several in my day pack when hiking, just in case. The baby wipes could also be used on overnight backpacking trips when camping where no running water is available.
As a child, I remember visiting a several older relatives such as my grandparents, who had an outhouse on each of their farms. Grandpa's was a three hole outhouse. If I remember correctly, they had a small bucket of lime and would sometimes sprinkle a little over the poop. There was also some corn cobs and an old Sears catalog, just in case they ever ran out of toilet paper. If I am not mistaken, the corn cob is supposed to be used together with a page from the Sears catalog. As a child, I also enjoyed using the hand operated pump for pumping water from the well.
Of course they did also have one toilet and running water in the house, but as a child I found it more interesting to use the outhouse and the hand pumped well.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"What stops people digging latrines?"
I think you missed the part where it said ". . .a layer of urea crystals breaks down the waste into fertilizer, killing off disease-producing pathogens found in feces." The difference between shitting in a hole and burying this bag of shit in a hole is that the latter is not only sanitary, but it also helps crops grow.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Urea, hmm were else is that found, hmm.
Oh I know, urine. All we need to do is get them to shit and piss in the same latrine, or were you thinking they would use a seperate one for each?
Re:Don't they even own a shovel? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Don't they even own a shovel? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know why, but in many parts of India, the government needs to pay people to use a toilet. Even when the government supplies a deluxe porta-potty, the likes of which you can only find at a multi-millionaire rapper's BBQ, the people simply won't use it. I don't know if it's a cultural taboo, or that squatting on the side of the street is believed to be cleaner or easier, but the people just won't use them. I wonder if this bag would be useful in that kind of situation, or if the people just wouldn't use it either.
Remember, we live in a world where many Africans believe that having intercourse with a virgin will cure HIV. Then there are some cultures that punish women with floggings, execution, or even immolation, for having the audacity to be raped. Men are killed for wearing shorts, and lesbians are raped in an effort to cure them. Some people even believe that the moon landing was faked, and that the U.S. government caused the 2001 WTC attacks.
Even if people own a shovel, many simply won't use it because they're too lazy, or too stupid.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.thepett.com/ [thepett.com]
http://www.thepett.com/index.php?PageLayout=PRODUCTS&pageID=95 [thepett.com]
Too late. These are already in use. The "poo powder" is some kind of fungus that reacts w/the heat and liquid and gives off gas that kills the bacteria, so you can toss the bag in a trash can, landfill etc.
If you read the article (I know, I know) the Pee-Poo was designed to fit within the existing habits of some of the developing world where people already use plasic bags to dispose of their excrement, tossing it into open spaces. A standing toilet (like The Pett) would require more room and a change in behavior. The Pee-Poo just means buying special-purpose plastic bags, with the side benefit that (a) the waste is sterlized, and (b) it potentially can be reused as fertilizer if the community can organize an
Re:What does a toilet have to do with voting? (Score:4, Interesting)
The results is Dis*Enfranchise*d. The definition of the word is similarly reflected by modifiers. We take the root word, negate it (as in make it negative or opposite to the original meaning) and also state that the subject it is referring to has already happened (as in the past).
The definition Enfranchise according to Merriam-Webster is as follows:
Source:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/enfranchise [merriam-webster.com]
The first definition, "to set free" is simple enough. The second definition is simply one who has received a Franchise (our subject is a group of people after all), so let us examine the definition of Franchise. In essence, it is a right to something. (The etymology of the word is interesting, its base having the meaning "free".)
So back to analyzing the summary:
If we assume the summary refers to those people who have no access to a toilet then the definition does match the usage of the word. In addition if you have no alternative other than using a toilet (or perceive no alternative) then the word would be correct in its usage. In either case the word would be correct in usabe bacause the person(s) are certainly not free, they are constrained in either choice or action.
If we assume the usage is to apply to those who don't *like* toilets and would prefer an alternative then the word is misused.
I would recommend reading a book of grammar and the rules of the English language before commenting on the meaning of words. I would also recommend that you stop assuming that you know exactly what group of unnamed people a speaker or author refers to.
I am sure you have heard of the saying about what happens when you assume things. =)
Here would be some examples of dictionary references to the word Franchise:
From Merriam-Webster:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/franchise [merriam-webster.com]
From Reference.com:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/franchise [reference.com]
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Re:What does a toilet have to do with voting? (Score:4, Funny)
Wow, who woke up the Grammar Nazi?
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