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Peepoo, and the Frontiers of Wastefulness
In the last few decades, the human race has made great strides to combat its unprecedented wastefulness, recycling, reducing, reusing, etc. Nonetheless, a final frontier has persisted unchallenged: that most primitive or fundamental of our waste. Our hesitance to confront human excrement has long presented an opprobrium to the collective ecological conscience.
Yet a recent innovation suggests that we are turning that final corner. A Swedish entrepreneur has come up with a disposable, biodegradable bag which serves as a single-use toilet. It sanitizes feces, eventually turning waste into fertilizer and killing off disease-causing pathogens. Indeed, the Peepoo may prove especially advantageous in the developing world, where open defecation often contaminates drinking water.
A recent Times article on the Peepoo describes a number of interventions into human waste in the developing world, including one toilet that produces cooking gas from excrement. Indeed, human waste has been widely identified as a fertile site for innovation: the story even describes a “World Toilet Summit.”
