Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet

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For Cyril and Ephraim

A Toolik tower in 2010.

Preface

At Toolik Field Station in Alaska, it’s easy to find the toilets: look up. In the flat, treeless arctic tundra, they’re the highest thing around. They’re basically outhouses, but instead of sitting on the ground, they’re perched on holes over thousand-gallon collection tanks. Walking up the outdoor wooden staircase is as good as announcing to a hundred fellow campmates, I’ve gotta go.

It was while sitting on one of these holes in the tower during a journalism fellowship at the scientific research camp in 2010 that I first began to contemplate the quantity of pee and poop that a person can create—it was right there underneath me. I later found out how much: according to a synthesis of findings from around the world, about 100 pounds of poop and about 140 gallons of pee per person each year. At Toolik, where peak summer capacity is about 160 people, all that crap is a big problem. Not only does it begin to stink, but also the scientists can’t risk contaminating the pristine landscape—which is what they are there to research, after all—with their own waste. So every few days, a vacuum truck drives in on the Dalton Highway, sucks out the tanks, and hauls the contents far away.

Later, when I started to write articles for magazines about innovations in toilets for people who don’t have safe sanitation, I thought of Toolik’s poop problem in a new light. In many ways, it was just a microcosm of the world’s poop problem. Modern sanitation infrastructure has created the illusion that our excreta just disappear like magic, a phenomenon dubbed flush and forget. But poop doesn’t just drive down the highway into the sunset. Although it breaks down, its components live on and must go somewhere. Too often that’s to the wrong places, where they can poison people or ecosystems—whether in distant slums or in America’s cities, small towns, and wild areas.

But I also learned that people have been devising clever solutions for the poop in our midst since the dawn of time and we are again recasting toilets as an opportunity. I have become captivated by this vision and decided to write a book about it, because it’s not just about getting toilets to everybody—though that must happen, and quickly—but also about shepherding a new generation of them into the world that allows our bodies, our planet, and our societies to be far healthier.

When I started drafting this book in earnest in 2018, the realist in me found this vision sometimes exceedingly optimistic—hence the title Pipe Dreams—though worth sharing in the hopes that a wider public would include toilets in their own fights for justice, health, and restoring planetary balance. But as I finish it in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic is overtaking our tragically unhealthy world, the vision seems far more urgent and somehow also far more achievable. The home we have built for ourselves on this planet is falling apart in so many ways. Why not start the renovation with the toilet?

Let’s get something out of the way. I know it’s weird to read a book all about toilets. It’s still sometimes strange to me that I’m writing a book about toilets. As a child, I was not a fan of potty humor (for which I’ve now developed a fondness, if possibly not a knack), and I fortunately never had any medical condition that kept me in the bathroom for an extended period of time. Years ago, before I began this work, a delightfully weird friend tried to strike up a conversation about why toilets in Germany have a shelf in them where poop lands before flushing. Why would we talk about that? I remember thinking, shooting her an appalled look. To toilets, the lid on my mind was closed.

That is where most people start. Many of today’s toilet revolutionaries, regardless of their field, can tell a story about the moment that they opened their minds to toilets. Engineer Emily Woods started out working on water treatment systems for the world’s poor but soon came to understand that the contamination in the water she was treating originated with the lack of safe toilets, so she went on to co-found a sanitation business in Kenya. (We always joke that people join the poop world for fame and prestige, she has said.) Raul Pacheco-Vega, a Mexican-Canadian political scientist and geographer, was doing fieldwork in a small town in Mexico when he felt the call of nature. I spent literally an hour walking around town knocking on doors because I could not find a toilet where I could feel comfortable, he says. That’s when he concluded that having a toilet wasn’t enough. You may have access to a toilet, but you may not want to use it.

Mwila Lwando, a Zambian toilet entrepreneur, was visiting the country’s food markets with the idea of creating new information products for farmers when he noticed that those markets had no place for workers to relieve themselves. Whenever we’re here and we’re trying to use the toilet, we can’t find one. And it means that’s not only us; it means there’s sixty thousand other people who need to use it. So he changed course, instead providing clean, attractive pay toilets that recycle water through the system and generate electricity for lighting from biogas. He predicted a sanitation gold rush—and he wanted to get in on it.

Toilet archaeologist Gemma C. M. Jansen told me that it took her two decades before she figured out that she needed to imagine real people actually using the ancient Roman toilets she was studying. What is the path that they walked? What could they see? How comfortable was the seat? How would they have held their clothes? She had been inadvertently granting the ancients the same privacy that she would her friends. Only when she changed her perspective did she realize that some people wrote toilet graffiti from a sitting position, while others from a standing one—a sign, perhaps, that, people used the toilets in both ways.

For me, the process of opening my mind happened in stages. After Toolik, I started to see the stories where toilets were the main subject, often about places with little or failing sanitation infrastructure. But then I started to see that, because everybody poops, toilets play a role in every big story in the world. I followed news—some prominent, some buried—about overwhelmed wastewater treatment plants after hurricanes, poop piling up in national parks during a major government shutdown, sewage as a source of microplastic pollution, the toilet paper shortage that could occur after Brexit, and even the tale of the private toilet that accompanied North Korea’s Chairman Kim Jong-un to a meeting with President Donald Trump.

Finally, I came to realize that, until we consider toilets, we can’t understand any story, including our own. In the blockbuster film Hidden Figures, based on real NASA mathematicians in the 1960s, the brilliant protagonist Katherine Johnson, who was Black, has to run-walk her way across the campus, in pumps, to get to a colored women’s restroom. This routine trip puts her job at risk since her clueless white male bosses wonder why she is so rarely at her desk. Although the specific anecdote may be more fiction than fact, it gave me a new understanding of the practical realities of life under Jim Crow. Flies on the walls for millennia, toilets can be a veritable window to a greater understanding of almost every aspect of history, culture, and society, if only we take a look at them.

When I reflect on my own life, one particular toilet comes to mind. It illustrates the complex, layered meanings we assign to these places of elimination, at the same time we try to put them out of mind. As an undergraduate, I spent a lot of time in Columbia University’s physics building, Pupin Hall (which, I should add, is not pronounced poopin’ hall). Like many of its era, the historic brick structure had only one restroom per floor. Most floors had men’s rooms; only on a few floors were there women’s. The one I used was practically luxurious, unlike any other on the whole campus, equipped with a chaise longue and generous piles of free sanitary products. Yet, as I remember, hardly anyone was ever in there. That was lovely in a way, and I sometimes used it to rest and think and just get a break. At the same time, however, every trek to that frilly ghost toilet managed to remind me that my uterus made me a rarity, maybe even an oddity, in the world of physics—a world, in the end, I chose not to enter.

About a decade later, those same restrooms became a flash point in a different but related cultural transformation. By then, they had gotten reapportioned in a more welcoming (and, one hopes, representative) way: six for men, five for women, and a gender-neutral bathroom. But, in 2017, news spread that a physics Ph.D. student had torn down LGBTQ-friendly signs, including one that read: Please use the restroom that is most consistent with your gender identity. The student who reported it saw the vandal give a look of disgust, and then rip it off and throw it away, he told the Columbia Spectator. This is just one of the ways in which, as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek put it, as soon as you flush the toilet, you’re right in the middle of ideology.

The lid on your mind may be already pretty open to the topic of toilets, or it may be just starting to open. I’ve come a long way since the time I refused to engage with my friend. Now I’m the one starting uncomfortable conversations and telling awkward stories. (Later, I’ll even plunge into why German toilets have those poop shelves.) Because, as I’ve learned, there’s nothing to fear when we talk about toilets. There’s only something to fear when we don’t.

A note on terms. A lot has been written about the history of the toilet’s many euphemisms. The toilet is a physical barrier that takes care of the physical dangers of excrement. Language takes care of the social ones, writes British journalist Rose George in her classic 2008 book on sanitation, The Big Necessity:

Water closet. Bathroom. Restroom. Lavatory. Sometimes, we add more barriers by borrowing from other people’s languages. The English took the French toilette (a cloth), and used it first to describe a cover for a dressing table, then a dressing room, then the articles used in the dressing room, and finally, but only in the nineteenth century, a place where washing and dressing was done, and then neither washing nor dressing. (They also borrowed gardez l’eau, commonly shouted before throwing the contents of chamber pots into the streets, and turned it into loo.) The French, in return, began by calling their places of defecation English places (lieux à l’anglaise) and then took the English acronym WC (water closet) instead. The Japanese have dozens of native words for a place of defecation but prefer the Japanese-English toiretto. You have to go back to the Middle Ages to find places of defecation given more accurate and poetic names: Many a monk used a necessary house. Henry VIII installed a House of Easement at his Hampton Court Palace. The easiest modern shorthand for the disposal of human excreta—sanitation—is a euphemism for defecation which is a euphemism for excretion which is a euphemism for shitting.

Indeed, sanitation as a term is also difficult, since you may know it as the general collection of trash, as in New York City’s Department of Sanitation. But I won’t use that meaning in this book, and I’ll prefer the straightforward toilet.

As for the foul stuff itself, shit has become a term of art among experts, be they archaeologists, engineers, or sociologists, and I’ll use it a little in this book. "It is a word with noble roots, coming from a family of words that also contains the Greek skihzein, the Latin scindere, or the Old English scitan, all meaning, sooner or later, to divide or separate, George writes. Today, however, it carries loads of meanings beyond the literal: as a noun, it can refer to objects (Is that your shit?), people (You’re a little shit), or experiences (That’s some crazy shit), and it’s also multipurpose as a verb (I do not shit you), as an adjective (What shitty weather), and as part of a wide variety of phrases (shit a brick, tough shit, full of shit," and so on).

Excrement, feces, ordure, and the like seem too formal, even jargon-y, and inappropriately sterile on top of that. Then there are the euphemisms, but human waste denies the value inherent in it, manure sounds like something from cows, while humanure hasn’t caught on because, well, it’s silly. There is no neutral word for what humans produce at least once a day, usually unfailingly. There is no defecatory equivalent of the inoffensive, neutral ‘sex,’ George writes.

There’s one euphemism that George doesn’t evaluate, however, and doesn’t use except when quoting others: poo, which in American English tends to get rendered as poop. About three centuries ago, it morphed from an onomatopoeic meaning of to make a short blast on a horn to to break wind softly—that is, to fart. From there it made the relatively easy transition to a children’s euphemism for excrement and the act of passing excrement. It is the case that a decade ago the term sounded nearly as silly as humanure and also nearly as taboo as shit. But Google Trends shows that, in the United States, interest in the term poop has steadily grown over the years, the word becoming almost four times as popular as it was in 2008, suggesting that society’s relationship with the term has shifted. (Shit, on the other hand, has held steady.)

A short history of the pile of poo emoji—which looks, on first glance, like a smiling swirl of chocolate soft-serve ice cream—is instructive. The symbol started in Japan in the 1980s as a reference to a joke from a popular manga series; in the late 1990s, it became one of the original emoji. (In Japan, golden poo charms are also a symbol of good luck because of a similarity in the sound.) In 2008, the pile of poo left Japan as part of the first Gmail emoji set, as a brown turd with yellow odor lines and flies flitting around it, despite executives’ worries about offending their customers outside Japan. Over time, though, the poo emoji got increasingly bigger eyes and a friendlier grin—ultimately it was so cute that people not only used it in their messages but also bought plush toys of it. People had started to like poop! For this reason—and also because poop goes with pee while shit goes with the unpoetic piss—poop and poo have become my preferred terms.

In part due to the abundance of euphemisms, people who work in this field tend to acquire nicknames, whether they want them or not. In the old days, there was the Groom of the Stool, the trusted and powerful male courtier responsible for assisting the king with his toileting, possibly including wiping the monarch’s bottom. Today, there’s the Poo Princess, the Queen of Latrines, Potty Girl, Mr. Toilet, Dr. Fatberg, Sewer Chic, Loo Lady, and the Puru. I have some nicknames, too. One is the Queen of Loo-topia—for reasons you’ll see in the coming chapter. Another was given to me by Dutch friends in The Hague, where I live. Here, as the story goes, before indoor plumbing posh people had fancy commodes. Still today the city’s preppies—those who pop their collars, drape their sweaters around their shoulders just so, pronounce their r’s at the front of their mouths instead of the back, and play field hockey at private schools with members of the royal family—are known as Haagse kakkers, or Hague shitters. I’m not known to hobnob with the Dutch elite, but, due to my odd interest in toilets, my friends thought I should be called a Haagse kakker, too.

I know that not everybody is as at ease with this topic as I am by now, after years of immersing myself in poop (fortunately not literally). Sometimes I forget just how uncomfortable it can make people. If you experience any discomfort while reading, please don’t let it stop you, because there is so much to gain by joining this conversation. We need to be willing to overcome long-standing taboos against thinking and talking about toilets, rather than flushing these uncomfortable thoughts away.

People joke about having eureka moments while on the toilet. But, looking back, I guess it really did happen to me. My multiple daily climbs up the towers at Toolik launched me on one of the most fascinating journeys of my life. Please join me up the wooden staircase to reconsider the toilet.

The New Toilet Revolution

Are you ready?

To keepe your houses sweete, clense privie vaultes.

To keepe your soules as sweete, mend privie faults.

—Sir John Harington, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596)

Getting to Loo-topia

I’ve come to the north of the Netherlands, to a medieval town called Sneek, population thirty-three thousand, whose name is pronounced with a hard a, like the tubular animal that tempted Eve with an apple, and not with a hard e, like the act of slinking around. An imposing seventeenth-century city gate, called the Watergate, sits astride one of the town’s many canals, and, in the summer, major regattas take over a nearby large lake, called the Sneekermeer.

But Sneek has a lesser-known tourist route, one for people like me, who are interested in the unsavory side of water. In 2004, a company called DeSaH (the Dutch acronym for Decentralized Treatment and Reuse) installed vacuum toilets, not unlike those you might have used on airplanes or trains, in a thirty-two-house complex. It treated the waste from those toilets in one garage instead of sending it through the sewers to a centralized treatment plant. The successor project, called Waterschoon (schoon means clean in Dutch), serves more than two hundred apartments. The now-king Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands himself came to open it in 2011 when he was still known as the Water Prince for his advocacy regarding all things Dutch and watery.

These New Sanitation projects are just a tiny corner of a new, global toilet revolution—a growing movement that has the goal of upending the way we manage our most basic bodily functions. The toilet we have today was born in England during the nineteenth-century Victorian sanitary revolution. It was a modern miracle: the ubiquitous user interface of a vast, reliable system of pipes, sewers, and, later, treatment plants that was both extraordinarily convenient and medically essential, stopping outbreaks of devastating diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever and giving countless people longer, more productive lives. In 2007, the readers of the British Medical Journal named the sanitary revolution the most important medical milestone since 1840, putting it ahead of antibiotics, anesthesia, and vaccines. In 2013, the Economist featured a flush toilet on its cover, with Rodin’s The Thinker sitting on it, wondering, Will we ever invent anything this useful again?

But our toilets no longer look quite so miraculous as they once did. While our societies have changed dramatically over the past century, we have allowed our toilet systems to stagnate. Today, they are inadequate to the challenges ahead of them. Our cities are growing, overwhelming their aging, inflexible infrastructures, especially during shocks such as storms. We’re throwing more and more junk into the system, from trash to oil to pharmaceuticals to toxic chemicals. And resources are growing ever scarcer, making the squandering of the water, nutrients, energy, and other components in wastewater harder to stomach. American inventor and visionary R. Buckminster Fuller could have been talking about the toilet when he wrote in 1970 that pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.

On top of that, despite some progress toilets fail to reach so many. According to the latest numbers from 2017, some 2 billion people still lack a minimally adequate toilet and hundreds of millions don’t use a toilet at all. Most of these are in low- and middle-income countries, where toilet systems fail to serve both rural and urban areas. Many cities are growing much faster than infrastructure can keep up with, and they can get so crammed in parts that there’s no room for private toilets. Sometimes sewage flows through open trenches instead of closed pipes. And people may resort to using flying toilets—poop-filled plastic bags that they discard in streets or ditches, or just fling away.

You might be surprised by other places that don’t have decent toilets. According to one report on the state of water and sanitation in the United States, It is safe to say that more than two million Americans live without complete plumbing and even that may be an underestimation. Accurate numbers aren’t available in part because, in 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey eliminated its question about toilet access. Lack of safe sanitation, as environmental health activist Catherine Coleman Flowers puts it, is America’s dirty secret.

Some people in the Black Belt region of the South, where Flowers hails from, unable to buy or maintain septic tanks specialized for the clay soil, straight pipe their wastewater just a few feet from their homes, into yards where children sometimes play. Researchers found that two in five study participants from one of these poor areas in Alabama had intestinal parasites, particularly hookworm, which today are mostly associated with low-income countries. In some rural Alaskan communities, where the ground isn’t suitable for wells or septic systems, thousands of people defecate into euphemistically named honey buckets, which they then empty by hand into very unsexy lagoons. In those communities, gastrointestinal, respiratory, and skin infections are rampant. In Hawaii, eighty-eight thousand mostly unlined cesspools—little more than holes in the ground—accept wastewater from toilets and other household plumbing, which then leaches out and contaminates local streams, groundwater, and the ocean with pathogens. And just a few years ago, San Diego’s homeless community, then the fourth largest in the United States, fell victim to a hepatitis A outbreak, which sickened 592 people and killed 20, in part due to conditions such as insufficient toilets and handwashing facilities in the encampments.

Around the world, the toilet has become a paradox. Lauded as a savior of civilization, it also exacerbates many of the world’s problems: inequality, disease, pollution, climate change, water shortages, soil degradation, waste. It’s time, many think, to escape the old paradigms and harness toilet systems not only to sequester poop but also to do a variety of other desirable tasks, such as guarantee everyone a place to go, watch for disease outbreaks, make fertilizer and fuel, manufacture components for bioplastics and asphalt, synthesize drugs, produce clean water, and build job-creating businesses. Bill Gates, the computer pioneer turned mega-philanthropist and toilet enthusiast, delivered a widely seen speech about radically new… alternatives for collecting, managing, and treating human waste, while he was wearing a suit and holding a beaker of shit (his own, one hopes—or doesn’t?). The focus of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is on the world’s poor, but the revolution is needed everywhere, poor or rich, cold or hot, sewered or not.

New Sanitation in Sneek is just one attempt to step away from conventional toilet systems, but it’s a good introduction to the revolution because it is a sort of photo negative of those. Instead of diluting poop and pee with water, it concentrates them; instead of handling poop and pee centrally, it does it locally; instead of primarily using resources to treat poop and pee, it makes resources out of them.

The process begins with the vacuum toilets. I try one out at the company’s small headquarters in an industrial park. For research purposes, they have installed the newest generation there, but only into their men’s room. I want—and fortunately also have a need—to use them, so my host, Moniek Agricola, the young engineer who takes care of much of DeSaH’s day-to-day maintenance, stands guard outside. They’re not like the metal toilets you’d see in an airplane but are instead fashionably white and curvy, with blue glowing buttons for flushing. There’s only a tiny amount of water in the bowl, which serves mainly as a security blanket for users. I sit down and make my offering. When I press the button, a hole at the bottom opens and the void, generated by a pump, sucks everything down with a whoosh! that is gentler than that on an airplane, even if I leave the lid open (which I’m not supposed to do).

In this damp region, the point of the extremely low-flow fixtures isn’t primarily water conservation, although a recent drought shocked the Dutch into rethinking their trust in the never-ending abundance of water. New Sanitation bases its treatment process on microbe-powered anaerobic digestion, which benefits from the vacuum toilets’ concentrated waste, rather than the aerobic digestion that forms the basis of conventional wastewater treatment. As you might know from your workouts, aerobic processes demand oxygen, and anaerobic ones don’t. Anaerobic digesters for sewage can save energy because they don’t have to pump air to the microbes that do the work. They also take up less space and leave less residue behind.

They have other benefits, too, as I see when Agricola takes me to the Waterschoon site, in a quiet complex that’s built of red bricks, solid and low to the ground, with some medieval-style arches for flair. The residents, who must qualify for government housing subsidies to live here, display knickknacks and grow plants in large windows. Pipes carry the toilet waste, known as black water, from about two hundred apartments to a treatment building at the center of the complex. Entering, I hear the loud hiss of machinery and my nose registers the sharpness of ammonia layered over an earthy richness. In a corner, the black water flows upward through a two-story black metal cylinder containing a blanket of microbes. These microbes, like the ones that thrive in lake sediments and the stomachs of cows, need little to no oxygen to live. As they munch on