This was originally posted on my blog. You can see pictures there.

For the second time since my wife and I moved here, the New York Times has profiled a part of India that is also part of our lives. The first time was when they discussed the power and infrastructure issues facing Gurgaon, the tech hub to the southwest of Delhi, illustrating their story with photos of the building in which I worked. Today the Times has done another report on Gurgaon, this time exploring the gap between the rich and the poor by showcasing the high-rise monstrosity in which we lived for our first six nights in the country. They got it right and they got it wrong: Hamilton Court is a symbol of what's wrong with India -- but it's also a symbol of how India is developing in spite of its government.

A few days ago, I posted about my experience at the World Toilet Summit in New Delhi. By popular demand, I present for posterity the full text of my address to that august body, dedicated to bringing sanitation to those who don't have it and improving it for those who do.

While most speakers discussed statistics and techniques, I talked about the one thing I know: the origin of the bathroom taboo, and how it affects attitudes towards a serious subject like sanitation. See, you're laughing already.

Fellow delegates, honored guests. Today I'm going to talk about how the flush toilet negatively shapes attitudes towards sanitation. And I'm going to tell you what you need to know in order to counteract the ideological influence of the flush toilet.

As at any other conference, delegates arriving at the 2007 World Toilet Summit in New Delhi are handed a tote bag full of schwag. Unlike any other conference, however, our bags contained two small plastic containers of human waste.

Composted human waste, of course. In one, a few powdery ounces of "human excreta-based manure" (2.0% nitrogen, 6.9% phosphorus, 0.4% potassium); in the other, a "hard ball" of composted humanure mixed with adhesive. I don't know what one does with a "hard ball" of poop, but I do know that it has absolutely no smell.

Yes, I gave it a whiff.

At the 2007 World Toilet Summit, which runs until Saturday, 153 international delegates from 39 countries have joined 172 Indian attendees to discuss and debate issues of sanitation. This year's theme is "Toilet for All" -- a reference to the 2.6 billion people around the world who don't have one, which contributes to 1.8 million children dying of diarrheal diseases every year. Academics, scientists, economists, bureaucrats, NGO representatives, and at least one writer of books about poop have gathered to present papers, discuss strategies, examine technologies, and kick off preparations for the U.N.-declared International Year of Sanitation, just two months away.

On the morning of August 8, three inches of rain fell on Brooklyn. On the 3,200 Brooklyn acres that drain into the Red Hook treatment plant, 260 million gallons coursed into the sewers, mixing with millions of gallons of human waste already headed towards a plant capable of processing only 60 million gallons per day.

When flow exceeds capacity by that much, the only choice is to channel it all, untreated, into the waterways. And so emergency outflow points in Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal and across Upper New York Bay began to ejaculate diluted sewage.

But aside from homeowners whose basements were flooded by Gowanus sewage and beachgoers who swam in feces the next day, few people paid attention. After all, New York averages 53 combined sewer overflows (CSOs) a year, and 772 American communities suffer overflows during heavy rains. But since CSOs rarely make the news and few politicians want to stake political capital on sewers, the political will to fix them probably won't appear until the problem becomes a catastrophe.

This is the story of one such catastrophe: a stench so vile that it changed the course of human sanitation.

It's every author's dream that there exists some secret pocket of the world in which his work is fully appreciated. Realizing that dream is even more unlikely when the author's work has the word "poop" in its title. So it's a strange journey indeed that begins with founding a bathroom humor website and leads to a ceremonial honor by one of India's most important sanitary advocates.

Only 18% of Indians use toilets, according to the country's 2001 census. The 19th century wave of sanitary reform that formalized the west's bathroom habits didn't wash over India; today 13.6% of its urban population and 78.4% of its rural population still practice open defecation.  

Change is coming, though -- on high from organizations like UNICEF and the UN, which declares 2008 to be the International Year of Sanitation; and locally from advocates like Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, whose Sulabh International has, since 1973, built 1.2 million household toilets and 6,500 community toilet blocks that serve 15 million people.

Dr. Pathak is often cited alongside Ghandi for his work to liberate India's untouchable caste. And yet there he was, a sanitary visionary, laying a flower garland on a guy who wrote a book about poop.

This is cross posted from the Poop Culture blog.

I'm not one of those writers who will tell you that I nervously sniffed the glass of former toilet water.

Not me. I put my nose to the surface of the water and inhaled with gusto, with vigor, with complete faith in the technology that scrubbed out all the bodily fluids suspended in it only hours before.

And I smelled nothing.

Around me, members of the US Society of Ecological Economists grinned. A few took pictures. And a man named Ed Clerico beamed -- as well he should. It is his company, after all, that designed, built, and operates the system that purified this water: the US's first onsite water reclamation system in a multi-family residential building, here in the basement of the Solaire.

Today the Solaire is one of only five buildings in New York City that are reclaiming their wastewater. But the city is considering a capital incentive for water savings -- which means many new buildings may soon join the Solaire in consuming less, discharging less, and reducing pressure on the city's infrastructure and resources.

As long as political and environmental groups help make it happen.

The entire human race just changed adjectives.  No longer are we a rural species; as of May 23, 2007, humanity is urban.

This news comes to us from the United Nations Populations Fund: for the first time in our history, the majority of our species lives in towns and cities. In fact, researchers at two American universities claim that May 23 was the tipping point -- the very day the 3,300,000,001th person left his or her farm for life in the big city.

But when people crowd into cities, problems of sanitation follow. I describe the relationship in my book: "As a population's density grows, so too grows the threat from its accumulated poop. {A population's} safety depends on being able to destroy poop faster than it can produce it." With that in mind, the UN's report should bode ill for the sanitary health of our species.

But according to UNICEF, the trend is the opposite: as worldwide population density has increased, we humans have actually gotten better at managing human waste.

This is cross-posted from the Poop Culture blog.

For the first humans who gave up the nomadic life and settled into towns and villages, the problems quickly piled up. Quite literally, I mean: stinking, fly-covered piles of you-know-what. Sedentary humans rapidly learned that civilization and sanitation are inseparable -- without laws and taboos regulating the disposal of human waste, stench and disease overwhelm civility and decorum.

Today we rely on toilets, sewers, and sewage treatment plants to keep us safe from our waste. But despite millions of lives saved, this sanitary model is not the paragon of human achievement. Rather, it's a jury-rigged series of fixes applied to salvage an infrastructure designed in accordance with flawed science. It's far from the ideal sanitary model. But in the short term, we're stuck with it.

Which means that while civilization's last great sanitary leaps came from London and Washington, the next is more likely to come from Lagos.

This is cross-posted from the Poop Culture blog.

Last December, New Yorkers were given a taste of what the public toilets in Heaven must be like when Charmin opened up temporary luxury toilets in Times Square. Shoppers streamed in and streamed out during the Christmas season; but by the time the ball dropped the toilets had been dismantled, and New Yorkers were once again queued up at McDonalds thanks to a lack of publicly-funded options. A similar experience began last December on London's Oxford Street, except their luxury bathroom is here to stay.  The difference: it costs a pound to drop a pound -- that is, $2 just to do what comes most natural.

This is a sad (and, for some people's dry cleaning bill, disastrous) byproduct of economic growth: as wealth increases, public toilets disappear.

This is cross-posted from The Poop Culture blog.

By the time World War I rolled around, most American cities could boast tremendous sewer networks. Sewage treatment, however, wasn't part of the picture -- most sewers simply outflowed into the nearest waterway. And you can imagine how America's waterways stank. Congress began seriously funding sewage treatment research in the fifties, but it wasn't until the seventies when the government finally decided that a civilized society is one that manages its waste.

Since then, America has invested $250 billion into its sewage infrastructure, typically building on centralized plants based around primary and secondary treatments. And while this 1950s and 60s-era process does an adequate job of separating waste from water (and more recent tertiary treatment helps further cleanse it), this process is expensive, land-intensive, energy-hungry, and glisteningly ripe for innovation.

But there hasn't been any incentive to innovate.

This was posted on the BM Newswire on PoopReport.com, where I am the editor. Please note that the author is Bunga Din; I'm reposting it here because, as you'll see, it really is quite profound.

A well-written piece in The Globe and Mail recently explored the history and conditions of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon -- something most North Americans aren't really well informed about. And while the story of the refugees and the conditions they are forced to endure is a huge story in itself, I realized that HOW this article was presented -- and the possible motivations of the writer -- were worth a look here on PoopReport.

Because where war and suffering have failed, the writer uses sewage to create empathy.

 

Cross-posted from the Poop Culture blog.

There's a reason tough kids smoke in them, bullies run wild in them, and geeks weigh their need to poop against the atomic wedgies that await in them: school bathrooms are no-man's land. School administrators, balancing students' privacy against students' propensity to go all Lord of the Flies when teachers aren't looking, have to lean towards the former. Rights groups cheer, but chess club weenies quake in their double-knit reversible slacks and hope their sphincters hold out through the bumpy bus ride home.

Says Tim Byles, chief executive of England's Partnerships for Schools: "Toilets are recognized as a hotspot for bullies to threaten and intimidate others."

Don't I know it. But what can be done?  The price of bathroom privacy is freedom for Metallica t-shirt-clad louts to patiently lay in wait for the next bespectacled incontinent to stumble into its den.

Unless there's a third option.

Cross-posted from The Poop Culture Blog.

With news that North American farmers might endure a fertilizer shortage, here are two completely unrelated numbers:

1. Farmers in the US use sixty-seven million pounds of nitrogen fertilizer every single day.


2. Toilet users in the US flush 108 million pounds of poop down the toilet every single day.

Why do I call those numbers "unrelated"? After all, the poop-educated amongst us will instantly recognize that #2 can replace #1 -- that human waste, when properly composted, makes excellent fertilizer. You know that humanity's place at the top of the food chain means we're supposed to be at the bottom, providing food for bacteria and plants. Can't the poop we flush grow the food we eat? Why endure a fertilizer shortage when we're flushing 108 million pounds of fertilizer down the toilet every single day?