PIPE DREAMS

A chronicle of the quest for the loo of the future.

Toilet humor is one thing, but toilet fact, as digested by skilled science writer Wald, is quite another. Given that the average annual output of each human is “about 100 pounds of poop and about 140 gallons of pee,” human societies have always felt a pressing need to figure out what to do with it. One ancient Mesopotamian settlement, writes the author, devised the pit latrine, with a network of subterranean ceramic rings that helped distribute human output into the nearby fields, yielding agricultural benefits. Many places have devolved since that time. In rural India, for instance, people repair to favored outdoor venues that, with modest usage, can accommodate the visits while Indian cities produce enough output to destroy the country’s rivers. That’s the standard for roughly half the world’s population, Wald reckons, and this yields a lethal roster of diseases. If the human gut is “one of the most densely populated and biologically diverse microbial habitats on earth,” some of its contents include norovirus, E. coli, and other illness-causing elements. Just as the toilets we rely on turned up during plagues of old, so the current coronavirus crisis should prompt a new kind of toilet, one that will “not only thwart pathogens like those that cause cholera and typhoid but also protect against a modern scourge: a wide range of man-made pollutants…that enter our sanitation systems. Beyond that, it might even monitor the daily deposits of users, communicating with doctors and public health officials in order to catch individual diseases and community outbreaks early.” Arriving at new toilet designs figures into much of this lucid narrative, with solutions that produce biodegradable concrete coatings and fertilizer. A new toilet is essential, writes Wald, for “if sanitation doesn’t work for all of us, it works for none of us.”

A highly informative, well-reasoned call to rethink the throne.