Rules on Scoring Golden Goals with 500,000 Tons of Feces
“Over 500,000 tons of feces are openly defecated every day to the environment around the world. That’s enough to fill the 30,000-seat Stade de Genève, where the Euro 2008 football tournament kicks off this weekend, three times over. But the global sanitation crisis is not a mere game: it pollutes the very environment upon which humans depend. Providing toilets and protecting the environment would be a winning combination for people and planet”, says the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC).
The above was an opening line from an email communication sent out this week from Geneva, Switzerland by David Trouba, communications officer of WSSCC to mark events around the World Environment Day on 5 June, and the Euro 2008 football tournament.
We are told that each year, more than 200 million tons of human waste go uncollected and untreated around the world, fouling the environment and exposing millions of people to disease and squalor.
Midway through the International Year of Sanitation (did you know that?), the council that sits at International Environment House is trying to rewrite old rules that will ensure fair play by calling on governments, stakeholders and individuals around the world to accelerate the work to end these ongoing human and environmental catastrophes but which are largely ignored.
Not that WSSCC is trying to play coach here, but as John Madden (he of the American football kind) said: The fewer rules a coach has, the fewer rules there are for players to break, meaning action now on sanitation for all, towards Millenium Development Goal number 7 on ensuring environmental stability in relation to water, sanitation and human settlements targets by 2015, not talk shops and more talk shops on issues of heavy importance as fecal matter.
This will require colossal sums of money nor breakthrough scientific discoveries. Using existing, proven approaches and technologies, and for about US$ 10 billion a year – less than 1 percent of global military expenditure. That was Rule 1.
Rule 2 is that a healthy living environment depends on sanitary toilets. Imagine a community of 10,000 inhabitants, 30% of whom practice open defecation. Open defecation also goes by such lofty names as “flying toilets” or “wrap and throw”. Since each person produces 150 grams of feces a day, open defecation would result in 450 kg daily or more than 3 tons a week – or 100 full dump trucks’ worth of human excrement annually – deposited in the community.
Living in a squalid environment harms physical and psychological health, stigmatizing and often presents employment challenges, deepening human poverty. A healthy living environment, one that supports human dignity and is free of disease-transmitting agents and conditions, is impossible without sanitation services.
We are on Rule 3. Sanitary toilets aid environmental sustainability. Human waste enters water sources and land through open defecation, dumping of buckets, inadequate disposal via sewer pipes into water courses and onto unused land, and leakage from pit latrines. In the developing world, roughly 90 percent of sewage is discharged untreated into rivers, polluting waters and killing plants and fish.
In Southeast Asia alone, 13 million tons of feces are released to inland water sources each year, along with 122 million m3 of urine and 11 billion m3 of grey water. This presents a major health threat to people who depend upon open streams and wells for their drinking water as well as an economic blow to people whose livelihoods depend upon fisheries. Upstream water users find better quality water, whereas downstream users find “sewage sinks”. Water quality is worse near densely populated areas.
Reuse, reuse and reuse, so goes Rule 4. Reusing waste has many benefits. Sanitation involves a range of actions, but for a healthy environment – in communities as well as in the larger natural world – the top priority is separating excreta, with its host of biological pathogens, from contact with human beings as well as plant and animal life.
In areas where it is practiced, ending open defecation is a critical first step. But to fully realize the health, social, and economic benefits, the management of wastes must be considered. Conventional sewerage can now be supplemented with ecological sanitation technologies that make use of the nutrients in human waste.
WSSCC reports that in China today, 90 percent of human excreta is used in agriculture; the task is to make sure that raw sewage is not put on the fields. Chinese farming communities have proved open to the idea of urine-diverting, or “dry”, toilets that facilitate the re-use of excreta as fertilizer.
Albeit not too much for four simple golden rules to win for the environment while doing away with 500,000 tons of human raw stuff, or is it waste? But not without another footballing tip from Danny Blanchflower: “Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.”
Image Credit: Chefranden at Flickr under a Creative Commons license
