Hacker News Reader

Comment by aerophilic | Hacker News Reader

The issue comes down to cost. As he mentions in the article, the goal is to get to 5 cents a day. Just a basic calculation, a “standard” septic system costs between $1500-4000 to install, and lasts roughly 25 years. Just doing the math on the low end costs brings you to about $0.16 cents a day, 3X the goal Bill Gates is advocating.

Note: this isn’t even taking into account the cost of the toilet itself or any plumbing needed.

View on HN

Really all you'd need to do to drastically improve things is get them to simply dig a hole for an outhouse instead of the rampant open defecation seen in India and some parts of Africa. We can solve the more complex and exponentially expensive problems of water treatment later. Digging a deep hole gets rid of rampant cholera and incidental exposure.

Basically you've got to learn to crawl before you can run a 10k.

edit: You can get someone who is completely illiterate and cut off from civilization to understand the concept of digging a hole for the shit to go in. This has the added benefit of not requiring advanced manufacturing technology or materials. they just have to dig a hole and move the outhouse top over to the new hole when the old one gets full. This makes them self reliant.

Digging a hole is more challenging than you think.

It has to be deep enough, and far enough away from a home, road, water source, food supply, etc. Not all communities have a lot of extra land, so you're talking one or two communal toilets, which need to be large to support a large population, and someone has to maintain them.

If you have the land, you have to have money to construct them, as well as labor. Many households can't afford the $1 (that's one US dollar) construction cost, or the household simply can't perform the labor. In some cases, villages will come together to help fund and construct pit latrines, but these are the exception. Most just put up with the shame and disease of open defecation.

Once you do have them, you have cultural issues like India's manual scavenging problem (http://www.thealternative.in/society/manual-scavenging-thoug...) not to mention you literally have to go out and inform millions of tiny remote villages about why and how to change. It's very hard to get people to change.

Assuming outreach of one week per village, for the 600K censused villages in India, that's 11,506 years to just inform and convince them all to build pit latrines. Even 50 outreach teams would take 250 years. With 500 teams you can cut it down to 23 years.

>It has to be deep enough, and far enough away from a home, road, water source, food supply, etc. Not all communities have a lot of extra land, so you're talking one or two communal toilets, which need to be large to support a large population, and someone has to maintain them.

Literally any deep hole practically anywhere is a damn sight better than open defecation straight into the river, on the bank, or all over the streets. And it doesn't take an act of congress to fund it and change building codes, a civil engineer, excavator, and team of union laborers to get this stuff done like it does in the west. You just need someone who is personally motivated and determined and a shovel ideally. like this guy:

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

All you need is one person who knows that digging a hole would keep his kid from getting sick and dying and you'd have more trouble trying to stop him from digging that hole for an outhouse.

When that clicks for them. That their kid or wife or husband wouldn't have died if they bothered to dig an outhouse, they will be doing the work and telling everyone they know and also nagging people till their ears fell off when they catch someone shitting in the street.

And with viral growth, 10 years? Once 'everybody is doing it' it may not take as much time. How long did it take for cell phones to reach the most remote villages?

Doesn’t really work for China though. Plenty of public toilets around, and people (mostly children) will still take a shit in the street.

Hell, I was in Chongqing a couple months ago and saw a teenager literally unzip, in full view of everyone, and pea on (on, not into) a recycling bin. Next to a god damn public toilet.

In the middle of a shopping center.

Near a police officer.

A lot of people just don’t care.

If you gotta go, I guess?

I've seen people poop on the train platform in NJ. Really crazy, but Newark does not open the bathrooms until 7-8AM. So when you're waiting for the 3AM train to DC... what you gonna do?

Hold it.

Seriously. I can barely hold a piss with age.

We are talking about someone defecating on a train station platform.

I've a good 'decent' friend, who had to take a shit on the station platform. Because there was no other option available at the time. Some people can not hold their bowels. I'm sure he'd have surrendered to the station toilets if they were open. UK trains and stations frequently have shut or out of order toilets. I've foolishly hung on, thinking the train will be an option, only to discover it's a no can do. I'll go alfresco every time given the opportunity these days.

Oh, they're just like San Franciscans.

Except San Francisco has like zero public toilets.

Still gross, but, does human urination spread any diseases?

Taking a shit in the street is perhaps not such a problem if you clean it up afterwards? Culture is hard to change, but perhaps it can be accommodated?

"really all they need to figure out first is to talk to each other before we build mobile cell towers for them"

innovations drive change drive more innovation. I recommend Hans Rosling's talks. There is no such thing as the "Third World" anymore, they're all on various development trajectories. Don't think e.g. Somalia is typical for Africa.

And what I'm saying is a outhouse /is/ a huge innovation to many places in Western Africa and India. It's largely a cultural problem like rampant littering or pollution. One guy digging an outhouse and shitting in it won't make any more difference than a single person recycling. But if enough people do it they will see a huge improvement in public health and infant mortality.

I'd argue that going from shitting in the woods to a well engineered and cheap toilet is a much more attractive step for most people than having them dig outhouses. It's like with the washing mashines - once electrification is there it's one of the first purchases since it's such a quality of life improvement, and this has happened for a majority of the world's population.

I just watched a segment on this (VICE, Vox, other?). In some places, the cultural taboo is cleaning the pit. So in parts of India, with a history of castes, the pits are made impracticably large, to that it never (rarely) needs to be emptied.

Was it this one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V35Vw29tay0

Well spotted.

The thing is, you don't need to empty it really. You can just fill in the rest with dirt and dig a new pit 10 meters away.

Septic system lasts for 40 years. But installing a new septic is expensive. $4000 is in the low end

> the goal is to get to 5 cents a day

Anyone know which country is this considering?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com