A company in Sweden has developed the 'PeePoo' as a next best solution to more toilets, writes JODY CLARKE
IN KIBERA, the largest of Nairobi’s slums, finding a toilet isn’t a straightforward business. With just one latrine for every 200 of the area’s one million or so residents, many people make do with plastic bags instead. Hence the term flying toilet. Do your business, then chuck the bag. It’s either that, or queue for an open pit, out of which sewage runs downhill in open trenches, stagnating in pools where diseases such as dysentery and cholera breed freely.
But if the bag is one of the worst consequences of Kibera’s terrible sanitation problems, it could also be one of its solutions. At least that’s what Anders Wilhelmson, an architect and professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, is counting on.
Wilhelmson is the inventor of the PeePoo, a biodegradable bag that people can use as their own portable, personal toilet. And after a trial run in Kibera, as well as with his four children back in Sweden, he’s ready to begin mass production within the next few months.
“I was looking at sanitation issues around the world, and found that women, especially those in slums, had problems when it came to using the toilet,” says Wilhelmson.
“They are busy looking after the children, cooking and cleaning”, so they find it hard to go to the toilet during the day.
“In most cultures you can’t do it outside, you have to wait until the night, which means having to adapt,” he adds.
With no clean water pumped into Kibera and no waste taken out, Wilhelmson had to find a way to dispose of waste that involved none of the flushing we take for granted in the West.
In 2005, he began developing a slim, elongated bag, that people would use once, sitting, squatting or standing. Inside the bag is a thin gauze, which prevents contact with the excrement when used.
However, key to its success is a thin film of urea, which coats the inside. A non-hazardous chemical, the urea reacts with the faeces or urine in the bag, breaking the contents down into ammonia and water.
The organisms that produce diseases found in faeces, such as parasites and bacterias, are inactivated within two to four weeks, and what’s left over can be buried in the back yard and used as a fertiliser.
During a trial run earlier this year, the residents took to it quickly.
“People were very excited about it,” says Suraj Sudhakar, the project manager in Nairobi. “For women especially, it’s a huge benefit, as they no longer have to leave the cooking and children if they want to use the toilet.”
PeePoople, the organisation that Wilhelmson established to make the bag, plans on producing 500,000 a day by next year, which they will sell for around two cents.
More than two and a half billion people around the world do not have good sanitation, according to the United Nations, which leads to diseases that kill more than one and a half million people a year.
Indeed, so bad is the problem, dirty water kills more people than all forms of violence including wars, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
“The ideal solution is that you build more toilets but, but that’s not always possible. So inventions like this are one of the best ways around the problem,” says Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organisation.
