The toilets are one of the main gripes among attendees at 'green' gatherings. Not because they're too rudimentary in a 'drop/thud' latrine type way, but because organisers go to all the effort of setting up a green-themed shindig then wheel in noxious chemical loos.
Why, when you can even hire compost conveniences (www.thunderboxes2go.co.uk)? Ecological sanitation (ecosan) is almost always superior to the plumbed-
in thrones through which we expend 4,000 litres of water to wash away the 13 gallons of faeces and 130 gallons of urine we each produce annually (plus, huge amounts of energy are required to run sewage works). The Enviro Loo, a self-contained dry toilet, uses wind and sun to reduce solid waste to what proponent James Young (email@example.com) calls a 'cowpat left in the sun for six months'. The first UK Enviro Loo is now being enjoyed by volunteers on a Lancastrian allotment. The rest of us remain wedded to what sanitation expert Arno Rosemarin terms a 'flush-and-forget system'. The only toilet innovation most of us encounter is the 'low-flush loo', which offers pathetically minimal opportunities to lighten the load.
As Rose George reminds us in a new book, The Big Necessity, 1g of faeces can contain 10m viruses, 1m bacteria and 100 worm eggs. Toilets remain taboo, and this has led to global political neglect: 2.6bn people (41 per cent of the global population) have no access to sanitation at all. Each year more than 200m tonnes of human waste and vast quantities of waste water and solid waste go untreated around the world.
The sobering fact - articulated in WaterAid's recent report 'Tackling the Silent Killer: the Case for Sanitation' (www.wateraid.org.uk) - is that unless this changes, most Millennium Development Goals will be unachievable. Lack of access to sanitation causes around a quarter of all child deaths in the developing world.
In another new book, The Last Taboo, Maggie Black and Ben Fawcett (www.earthscan.co.uk) make a compelling case for ecological sanitation in the developing world, as opposed to pit latrines. The latter - 'the oldest and most widely used toilet in the world' - are prone to flooding and pollute groundwater. Neither do we want to export a dependency on wasteful flushing loos (it's not practical, in any case). We need a revolution in which human waste is viewed not as something we're taught to flush away at the greatest speed possible or flung over a wall in a plastic bag (common in developing-world mega cities, where one-sixth of the global population lives without access to sanitation), but rather captured as a potential resource. With compost toilets, waste drops into a dark hold and a ventilation system pulls air down to prevent odour. In the chamber, the liquid and solid waste separate - the liquid can be used immediately as fertiliser; the solid waste is stored for at least 12 months, then harvested as compost. That's where our pennies need to be spent, and urgently.