‘Toilet revolution’ would benefit millions of rural residents

The area around the Yangtze River estuary is often referred to as “China’s Venice”, because of the large number of villages that straddle rivers in this part of East China. Fei Xiaoliu, 56, grew up next to the river in Changshu, a small city in Jiangsu province, washed by the Yangtze River.

It only takes about 20 seconds to walk from her house to the riverside. In the 1970s, the residents of rural Changshu carried their “portable toilets” — small wooden buckets — to the river bank, where a boat stopped every morning.

“We poured the waste into a container on the boat, which went from one village to another. The ‘night soil’ was applied to the fields as fertilizer,” she said.

Even today, many families in rural China have a portable toilet because few have indoor sanitation and are reluctant to use public toilets late at night.

The need for improved sanitation is urgent, not only in China, but also in many other parts of the developing world, especially in urban areas.

In the early 1950s, mass “patriotic health campaigns” were launched in China, aimed at improving the low level of sanitation and hygiene, and to control waterborne diseases. The construction of toilets in rural areas was an important part of the campaign.

Statistics from the National Health and Family Planning Commission show that in 1992, only 7.5 percent of residents in rural areas had modern sanitary facilities. In the decades that followed, the number soared, reaching 75 percent last year. By 2020, about 85 percent of China’s rural population is expected to have access to modern sanitation.

According to Fan Bin, from the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the rural population is currently about 700 million, and even with the acceleration of the nationwide urbanization process he estimates that the urban population will be about 500 million for years to come.

“A sanitation revolution is a basic requirement if we want to raise living standards in the rural areas,” Fan said, adding that wider adoption of eco-toilets would also benefit agricultural development.

Official statistics show that China consumed about 35 percent of the chemical fertilizers used in the world in 2013. The high figure is a result of the expansion of areas of cultivation and a failure to recycle human and animal waste for use as fertilizer, Fan said.

“The excessive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides will result in soil and water pollution and soil hardening,” he said. “Reinventing the toilet and recycling separate types of human waste would be a good solution.”

He said many parts of the country are hives of construction, and the benefits of improved sanitation would be enjoyed by the high-density population that would result when the work is completed.