Priority Number Two: Sewer Guru Says It’s Time To Get Serious About The ‘S’ Word

Rose George never expected to spend two and half years of her life researching shit. Or, to be more polite, sanitation. But, recognizing how neglected the subject was in popular discourse, she decided to step into the breach. Happily, the results of her efforts have been impressive. Her new book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters, has–in addition to being a charming and engaging read–initiated a much-needed public conversation about the inadequacy of public investment in sanitation in both developed and developing countries. These days she’s working on the issue for the Gates Foundation, giving speeches at places like the World Water Forum, and meeting with Congressional representatives–basically, trying to convince  anyone who’ll listen that it’s time to get serious about sewers.

We caught up with George last week by phone at her home in England and discussed, among other subjects, the world’s most luxurious toilets, why people are unlikely to protest for better sanitation facilities, and how mishandled lingerie can create a nasty sewage spill.

How hard is it to get people to discuss human excrement and all the problems it causes?
There’s a lot of receptiveness to the topic actually, but it just requires someone who is noisy about it and knows how to frame the message properly. Particularly when it’s put in financial terms, people are very receptive.

What’s the financial argument?
You reap $7 dollars in economic rewards for every dollar you spend in basic sanitation. That makes it a really, really good investment. In the developing world, it may cost a couple hundred dollars to install a decent latrine, but think of what you save in terms of health costs and what you would otherwise lose when your workers are off with dysentery or whatever. And in developed world we’re learning that if you don’t continue investing in infrastructure you just going to pay a lot more later. It’s that simple.

Don’t most people assume that once a place has a working sewer it really doesn’t require that much ongoing investment?
There’s an example in my book involving a matching bra and knickers set that caused a major clog in the sewer in county Durham, here in the UK. Someone flushed it down the toilet and because the system was in a rather fragile condition anyway, it created a clog and cost the government tens of thousands of dollars to repair. That’s a lot of money for a lingerie set. This kind of thing happens constantly, of course.I read a case recently about a sewage spill caused (maybe) by a prison jumpsuit that had been flushed down someone’s toilet.

What makes a sewer be vulnerable to something like that?
The biggest hazard is fat. We pour so much grease down drains — restraurants especially — and all this stuff clogs up sewers. It solidifies into really disgusting, smelly, nasty blocks that impede the works. In theory there should be fat traps, but in practice there’s very little compliance or enforcement for that.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the sewers in this country a grade of D-minus — tied for the lowest of any category of infrastructure. After all your reporting, do you agree with that assessment?
Yes, totally. A lot of the sewer systems in States are more than a hundred years old. They were being built not long after the systems were competed in London and other European cities. Since that time, these systems have been added to incrementally, but they haven’t been replaced. If you have a garden wall made of brick and it’s exposed to the elements, it’s not going to look very good after 150 years. In a sewer they’re exposed to a hell of lot of water volume as well as whatever else goes down peoples’ drains and toilets — chemicals, for instance.

Unlike roads, most people can’t see the deterioration on a day-to-day basis though.
That’s right — it’s a sense of, out of sight, out of mind. They’re also not seen as a funding priority by government, which I find odd, because a city simply couldn’t function without that web of sewers beneath it.

In your book you describe how in the 19th century New York City’s leaders planned a water system that would last a hundred years or more - but the sewer was a bit less carefully considered.
Right, the sewer system was constructed independently by the various boroughs. It’s an absolute miracle that it works as well it does. But it does still mostly do what it is intended — namely, to separate us from our potentially toxic human waste.

You spent a fair amount of time with the people who keep it working.
Yes. The people who work in the sanitation industry have a sense that they are the unsung heroes of city life. And it’s true. Everybody loves firefighters and police officers, but nobody loves sewer workers. The trouble is that people only realize how important the infrastructrue is when something goes wrong. In fact, sewer workers and waste water treatment managers refer to themselves as firefighters of sorts, because they also tend to move from one crisis after another. They’re generally responding. The public has the same kind of relationship with it. When there’s a problem they realize it isn’t very nice to have raw sewage pouring into your basement and maybe we should pay more attention to our sewer networks–but once that immediate problem is fixed, they put it out of their minds again.

What’s the remedy?
Two things. The economic stimulus package is giving four billion for wastewater infrastructure. Which is good. But there’s still an enormous shortfall. According to the EPA it’s a $120 billion in the next ten years or something. Another group says we need $500 billion over the next twenty years, for both our drinking water and wastewater networks. But what this money from the stimulus has all done is establish it as a priority, and that’s good. So, money is one solution. It pays for maintenance and so forth. But what’s missing from the conversation is that the modern system of wastewater treatment is not the only answer. It works up to a point, but it there is certainly reason to start exploring alternatives like on-site sanitation.

For example?
So there are composting toilets. But also you can have “gray water” separation systems where you take the water from your bath and your sink and you use it to flush your toilet. We live in water stressed times. Just look at California. They need to seriously be asking the question of whether it makes sense to be sending that much clean drinking water straight down the toilet. It’s very expensive and takes a lot of energy to turn it back into drinking water.

Are there models we should be looking at?
There are countries that are already experimenting with these options — Norway and Sweden, for example. They’re using urine diversion toilets and powering taxis and buses with biogas. (Biogas is essentially methane that comes from fermented biological waste products — in this case, sewage.) Even in the US there has been discussion of gasification of sewage sludge–a technique dates from the 1800s.

Is it a case of returning to more primitive techniques for dealing with our waste?
It’s true that they’re not new. Biogas was first done in the late 19th in India. It’s because we’ve used this apparently perfect solution of complicated wastewater treatment systems for so long that we’ve discarded the “primitive” techniques. But actually I don’t think they are primitive. I think they’re just common sense.

In the U.S. the toilet has remained basically unchanged for a century or more. That’s not the case in Japan.
In Japan, they’ve had a toilet revolution. It’s fascinating. Over there the toilet has become this high tech luxury item. Part of it is that they have money and they like gadgets. But the cultural context is that the Japanese have a bathing culture, so getting them to use water in their anal cleansing processes was not too difficult. In the US, by contrast, there seems to be quite a lot of resistance to moving away from toilet paper.

You’ve described toilet paper as being about as sensible as trying to take a shower using some dry paper towels.
It’s amazing how many Americans have developed coping mechanism because they’re not satified with toilet paper — when I’ve done Q&As online and read the comments after, they’re very open about carrying a bucket of wet wipes or a Coca-cola bottle filled with soapy water. It’s been quite a revelation. So I do think Americans could eventually be receptive to improving the toilet paradigm. But I’m not sure they’ll ever want to pay for one that plays them music and warms the seat.

It sounds like you have an opinion on the matter though.
The Japanese toilets are just so much better. If I had a spare thousand dollars, I would buy one.

Is there a business opportunity here?
The Japanese companies are trying. Toto, the largest maker, has a showroom in Manhattan. They’re trying to market it to celebrities and make it a real luxury item. But they just haven’t had a lot of success yet.

There’s an amazing opening vignette in the book that involves you being led to a “bathroom” in the Ivory Coast — and it turns out to be just a room without so much as a hole in the ground. At that or any other point while researching the book, did you feel like you’d gotten in too deep?
I didn’t get as queasy as you’d think. Though I was pretty nervous about going down into the sewer. I just had no idea what to expect, and I have no great tolerance for the smell of excrement — I dislike it as much as the next person. But, in fact, it didn’t smell down there — just a bit musty, was all. I do remember two very low points though. In one case, I was in China and discovered that public toilets have no door. I had no choice but to go with a line of Chinese women watching me. That was quite odd. The other was spending time in slums of India. There were simply no toilet facilities and filth was everywhere. It made me mad that that was what people were given in life–but also that they would accept it. There are protests for so many other things, but you rarely have people marching in the streets saying, “We want toilets.”

Do you think this something to do with the fact that people are embarrassed to discuss this stuff?
If that were the case though my book would have disappeared without a trace. So I don’t think that’s true. I just think there are ways of talking about it in an approachable and non-threatening way. Over the past two and half years when people ask me what I’m working on and I say, “Toilets” or “Shit” or whatever, almost invariably they responded with an anecdote. Very few people changed the subject. There’s a perceived taboo, but I don’t think it actually stands up.

By definition, if a slum doesn’t have a sanitation system, doesn’t it become a big outdoor unregulated toilet?
Well, India is a big outdoor unregulated toilet. It has a population of a billion and 750 million of those do open defecation (which means what it sounds like). But there’s this really interesting new scheme called Open Defecation Free India in which villages compete to be open defecation free and if they succeed they are given a prize by the president of India. It’s been successful but there’s a long way to go.

Isn’t it relatively easy just to dig latrines in these places?
You’d think it would be easy to convince people they need latrines or that they can’t afford not to have latrines. But often they need to be persuaded. I met a guy at a workshop in the Himalayas and he was a health worker who had been given a free latrine by the government of India. It was a very nice latrine. He’d had never used it. He knew all the facts about disease and human waste. He like to relieve himself outside by the river. He thought it wasn’t causing any problems, even though he knew people lived downstream and were drinking the water and washing in it. He just hadn’t computed it all.
How do you deal with that problem?
There’s a community-based process I write about in the book, trying to trigger people in realizing that they’re polluting their own environment. In this case, they put a plate of food on the ground and plate of excrement beside it, and people watched as flies arrived and flew back and forth between the two plates. It shocks people into realizing what they’re actually doing. So this guy saw the demonstration and said, “Oh my god, I’m going to start using my latrine tonight!” He was really overwhelmed.

It sounds like both the developed world and the developing world need to be smarter about investing in santitation systems. Why are we being so stupid about something so basic to our quality of life?
It’s all very psychological. Because we’re talking about human beings, it’s complicated and behavioral like everything else.