Reinventing the toilet in Madagascar | Hacker News Reader

Reinventing the toilet in Madagascar

mosaicscience.com

55 pointssergeant327 comments

Not sure how this is any better than a good composting toilet set up. Grew up with one in the house (hippy parents) and it doesn't smell and is minimal maintenance. Not sure how well this would translate into an urban setting but that seems like a solvable problem (and a better approach than a subscription based service like this one).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composting_toilet

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258852961_Compostin...

Looking at that Wikipedia page, the composting toilet sounds rather more complicated and expensive. Also potentially it does not destroy pathogens completely. The approach of the "Loowatt" keeps the residential installations simple, sanitary, and inexpensive, and locally centralizes the composting in a process that uses high heat to completely eliminate pathogens.

This. Sometimes decentralized solutions are great, but most people don't want to become experts at the sanitary biological processing of human waste (especially inside their own home). For safety and efficiency reasons it makes sense to aggregate that at the community scale. Think of it like the local sewage treatment plant.

Actually it's better than a conventional sewage treatment plant, because

* it safely recycles fertility (interrupting the fecal-oral route, unlike "night soil"), providing a sustainable alternative to phosphorus mining and other fossil fertilizers

* it doesn't discharge fertilizer into waterways where it causes eutrophication and "dead zones"

* it produces biogas energy rather than being a large energy consumer

* it doesn't squander potable water to transport human waste, and

* it doesn't require a huge network of underground pipes, which have enormous embodied energy and replacement cost. If your city can't afford to replace the underground pipes, your water system is insecure and unsustainable for that reason alone.

Here's another large scale biogas digestor operation (this one's for food waste): https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/magazine/the-compost-king...

Yeah those are good points. Also I realized that we have a "subscription service" with indoor plumbing through paying for water. There's no reason something like this couldn't be paid for through a tax which would encourage wide scale adoption.

The article mentions the water table as a problem.

The residents can also request service by text message when the bag fills up or if something breaks.

I'm surprisingly pleased to find that they didn't decide to make the toilet itself some fancy IoT thing that phones home, and instead kept it "dumb".

I'm extremely fascinated by this topic.

It's amazing how something as simple as a toilet, that we take for granted everyday, is such a monumentally difficult thing to re-engineer cheaply for the world's poor.

That's because our toilets are unsustainable. The problems of the poor are hard to solve because the rich solve problems by pushing them off onto the poor. The poor don't have anyone to push their shit on because they are the people shit gets pushed on.

If we're still talking about toilets, this really depends on local conditions. In USA east of the Rockies, typical flush toilets aren't inherently problematic. In areas with less water, they are.

It's an outhouse with a bag.

The challenges of developing nations aren't technological, they are poor infrastructure or organizational.

It's been said... building a toilet is easy. Keeping it clean and operational for years is hard.

Many cabins in the mountains in Norway use thick plastic bags that you just tie off and dump in a skip when you leave. At least they did last time I rented one twenty years ago, so the general idea is not new. Sealing the waste in with a biodegradable film is a neat idea though and makes a lot of sense for a hot climate.

What is a "skip" in this context? Not a native speaker here, sorry

> What is a "skip" in this context? Not a native speaker here, sorry

https://www.google.ch/search?q=skip&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=...

Known as a honey bucket in Alaska.

To be fair toilets are in fact dead simple, it's the plumbing that's a bitch.

The epicenter of the modern human waste problem is India. Has this project been tried in India? I know Gates is behind this project. If it has, I wonder what were the results, hurdles and practicalities.

From what I remember reading, a lot of this tended to be cultural more than anything. Free++ and clean public restrooms are readily available but many residents in rural villages don't use them for various reason. The most attention-garnering reason was an article where a local sanitation worker reported that people were superstitious about toilets, believing them to have witches. [1]

In a less supernatural but similar vein, many still prefer open defecation in fields, as they traditionally have done.

It's not just a matter of infrastructure, it's a societal change for many people.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33980904

++ Edit: added "and clean" after Free.

Here's a link to the site for the toilet: http://loowatt.com/

Modern day outhouses are serviced by a truck that come s and vaccums out the waste.

How is hauling off a bag any better?

FTA outhouses in Madagascar tend to be serviced by a couple of guys with buckets.

They all work for the King of the Golden River

The bag is sealed right away and doesn't become a heaping lab experiment of ick before it is collected.

Combined with a hyperloop type delivery system, this could be upgrade on the flush toilet

These are all lame attempts to 'hack' nation development. If the country is so broken that flush toilets are 'not an option' there, go and fix the government (that might require a few JDAMs), civil society, and only then, infrastructure will follow. Don't try to fix consequence not touching the cause.

What if you could only fix the consequence and not the cause because of your limited funds? Would you decide against doing so?

Absolutely. Any fix won't work long term. I relate this to all attempts to do 'small thing' improvements in developing countries like providing solar power to places where grid is 'not an option', makeshift toilets, makeshift electronic money on Android phones instead of normal banks etc. These things just don't work long term, they prolong the suffering much more than actually help. There is no 'hack' around building the functioning civil society, fixing corruption, tribalism and crime, and building a bull blown infrastructure - highways, railways, airports, electric grid, dams and bridges.

In fact, even just forcibly building infrastructure without putting the groundwork of civil society, democracy and working laws in place doesn't work so much - see Soviet Union.

>In fact, even just forcibly building infrastructure without putting the groundwork of civil society, democracy and working laws in place doesn't work so much - see Soviet Union.

1. Former Soviet Union countries are much better off than Madagascar.

2. However, the best counter example is China.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com