A new loo: Gaze into the toilet
Despite our complicated relationship with it, our poo could one day power our cellphones, tablets and laptops
Eleonore Rartjarasoaniony stands in the middle of her yard, watching two young men in colourful overalls and rubber boots service her new waterless Loowatt toilet, which replaced her pit latrine a few months ago.
At the Malagasy woman’s feet, two lean, long-legged chickens, amid a flock of fluffy chicks, peck at anything remotely resembling food.
Inside a wooden shack behind her, Rartjarasoaniony’s elderly mother greets customers through a small window that overlooks the narrow, unpaved street in the capital Antananarivo. That’s Rartjarasoaniony’s shop, in which she sells a bit of everything — kitchen sponges, eggs laid by her hens and freshly brewed coffee, which she hands out to customers in small metal cups, rinsed in a bucket of water from a communal pump.
As she describes her new toilet in the soft Malagasy language — and Loowatt’s manager Anselme Andriamahavita translates — you can discern the word tsara, which means “well”, as in wellbeing and healthy.
Rartjarasoaniony switched to her new loo because it’s cleaner and safer than her outhouse. “My family of four uses it, and so do my three tenants who rent the next house over — it’s included in the rent,” she says. “Even my son can use it,” she adds, echoing the worries of all Malagasy mothers, terrified that their young children may one day fall into a pit and drown in faeces.
Like most people, Rartjarasoaniony and her tenants don’t have modern sanitation systems in their homes, which are built with bricks made from red mud. Although cellphones are ubiquitous in Antananarivo, flush toilets are not. Most people use “Malagasy toilets”, meaning outhouses. Out in the country, some villagers don’t even have those — when nature calls, they head to the bushes. But traditional pit latrines aren’t a hygienic solution, and not only because they smell and are hard to keep clean.
Antananarivo has so much groundwater that many residents grow rice in their yards. When torrential rains hit, everything floods. The waste from latrines rises and floats into the yards, houses, shops and streets. The threat is very real. In a neighbour’s latrine across the street, the grey goo almost reaches the pit’s surface, a clear menace come the next storm.
“When we used the pit latrine before and it rained, sometimes the water would come out,” Rartjarasoaniony says. “We were afraid of getting sick because of the filth.”
The dire shortage of toilets is not a problem unique to Madagascar. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 2.4-billion people don’t have access to basic toilet facilities and nearly one billion can’t even defecate in private, using fields, street gutters or creeks instead. Many countries, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, face similar sanitation problems, says Francis de los Reyes at North Carolina State University in the United States, who designs sanitation solutions for developing countries.
In many places building a flushing toilet system, as we know it, is nearly impossible. Some places don’t have enough water. Some have too much, which complicates water treatment processes because of floods and overflows. Others don’t have the means to build the waterbased infrastructure. That’s why Loowatt, a London-based startup, came up with a flushing solution that doesn’t use water.
In Loowatt’s design, the waste is sealed into a biodegradable bag underneath the toilet with not a drop of water being spilled. Once full, the bag is replaced by a service team, and the waste is brought (yes, hand-delivered) to Loowatt’s pilot waste-processing facility, where it’s converted to fertiliser and biogas.
This very manual setup sounds archaic compared with the convenient Western arrangements. But sanitation experts think that in the era of climate change, when droughts and floods are becoming increasingly common, the West may have something to learn from the little waterless loos being piloted in Madagascan neighbourhoods.
With the world’s population increasing, places that historically relied on water for sanitation may have to reconsider how they flush.
When Loowatt’s Londonbased founder and chief executive, Virginia Gardiner, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature she never thought she’d end up designing toilets.
But then she went to work as a reporter for an architecture and design magazine covering industry events. “I was the youngest on the editorial team. Nobody else wanted to go to the kitchen and bath industry shows, so I did,” she recalls. One of the things that struck her was that architectural concepts evolved constantly, except for toilets.
She came to see the overall “bath culture” as wasteful and decided toilets were due for an upgrade.
When Gardiner did her master’s degree she focused on a waterless toilet system. In 2010, she founded Loowatt and ran a fundraising campaign based around turning shit into a commodity. In 2011, her idea won the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge.
More funding followed and, serendipitously, a Canadian expat living in Madagascar heard about Gardiner’s project and became Loowatt’s first investor. That was the reason Loowatt launched its first single-toilet pilot and a small wasteprocessing facility in an impoverished Antananarivo neighbourhood.
The project killed two birds with one stone — giving people a toilet and converting their waste into biogas, generating enough electricity to charge cellphones. When that proof of concept worked, Loowatt scaled the project up to 100 toilets serving about 800 customers.
Loowatt toilets don’t look very different from Western johns, with their plastic seats and flushing handles, which come in the form of a pedal or a rope pull. But, instead of releasing a swirl of water into the basin, this move activates the white biodegradable film that envelops and seals the waste, pushing it into the collector underneath the toilet, all odour-free. Loowatt’s service team replaces the biodegradable bag once a week, or more often if it fills up sooner.
Equipped with a small pushcart and collection bins, a two-person team walks through the neighbourhood daily, gathering waste bags and doing repairs. The residents can also request service by text message when the bag fills up or if something breaks.
The Loowatt setup isn’t free — residents pay about £12 as a deposit for a toilet (which remains Loowatt’s property) and about £3 a month for service. For Madagascar, where some families exist on £1 a day, this isn’t cheap. But Rartjarasoaniony says she finds it acceptable. Maintaining a pit latrine costs more.
“We have to empty it every six months and it is really expensive,” she explains, not to mention the unsightly mess it creates.
The process is done by emptiers — usually men who show up with buckets to chug the goo into containers, dropping splotches of repugnant gunk around the yard for her egg-laying hens to peck at.
Loowatt’s technician Edonal Razanadrakoto tinkers with Rartjarasoaniony’s toilet flushing mechanism. “In the older version of the toilet you had to push a pedal to make the bag seal the waste,” he explains, pointing at the plastic cogs and wheels. That mechanism ultimately relied on an internal rope, which often jammed and tore, so Loowatt switched to a sturdier, hand-pulled device. Now the toilets have to be upgraded. While Razanadrakoto changes the part, his coworker stashes the waste bag from underneath the toilet into a white bin on his pushcart and taps on the phone to update Loowatt’s online monitoring system: bag removed.
As the pair leave, Andriamahavita says another neighbour also wants to talk. “She was about to go to work, but heard we were in the neighbourhood, so she waited,” he says.
Middle-class Malagasies can afford certain perks, such as a TV, a stereo system, a smartphone, even a secondhand car. But a water flush toilet isn’t something an individual’s money can buy — even on a government salary, Andriamahavita explains.
The biggest problem with flush toilets is the infrastructure. “We don’t really have a sewage system like in the occident,” he says.
A flush toilet needs a sophisticated set of underground pipes linking it to a facility that can digest its output — a sewage plant that cleans the water, releasing it back into the rivers and oceans and reprocesses “biosolids” into fertiliser safe to put on to fields.
It takes the entirety of society to make sanitation work — an individual cannot master that challenge alone. Canadian epidemiologist David Waltner-Toews, author of The Origin of Feces, says it’s because humans have a very complicated relationship with their own waste.
A pile of shit begins to endanger humans almost immediately. Attracted to the nutrients — phosphorous, nitrogen and undigested proteins — inside that pile, pathogens swarm in. Some feed on it, others lay eggs. To stay healthy, people must keep their waste as far away from themselves as possible.
When our ancestors were nomadic they had it easy. They relieved themselves where they felt like and walked away from their precarious deposits. Sometimes they’d come back to where they took a dump last season to find fruit and berries growing, and made the connection that poo helps to sprout seeds. When people settled and began farming, they could no longer walk away from their waste, so they began to distance themselves from it, by accumulating it in pits, dumping it into rivers or shovelling it on to fields.
When people moved into cities, space became scarce and waste disposal got ugly. Waltner-Toews says that crowded living conditions