Chelsea Wald - Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet

A Toolik tower in 2010.

A t Toolik Field Station in Alaska, its easy to find the toilets: look up. In the flat, treeless arctic tundra, theyre the highest thing around. Theyre basically outhouses, but instead of sitting on the ground, theyre perched on holes over thousand-gallon collection tanks. Walking up the outdoor wooden staircase is as good as announcing to a hundred fellow campmates, Ive 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 createit 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 cant risk contaminating the pristine landscapewhich is what they are there to research, after allwith 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 dont have safe sanitation, I thought of Tooliks poop problem in a new light. In many ways, it was just a microcosm of the worlds poop problem. Modern sanitation infrastructure has created the illusion that our excreta just disappear like magic, a phenomenon dubbed flush and forget. But poop doesnt just drive down the highway into the sunset. Although it breaks down, its components live on and must go somewhere. Too often thats to the wrong places, where they can poison people or ecosystemswhether in distant slums or in Americas 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 its not just about getting toilets to everybodythough that must happen, and quicklybut 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 optimistichence the title Pipe Dreamsthough 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?

Lets get something out of the way. I know its weird to read a book all about toilets. Its still sometimes strange to me that Im writing a book about toilets. As a child, I was not a fan of potty humor (for which Ive 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 todays 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 worlds 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. Thats when he concluded that having a toilet wasnt 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 countrys 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 were here and were trying to use the toilet, we cant find one. And it means thats not only us; it means theres 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 rushand 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 onea 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 newssome prominent, some buriedabout 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 Koreas Chairman Kim Jong-un to a meeting with President Donald Trump.