Synthetic Feces, Tiger Worms & Toilets, Toilets, Toilets

The Project Sammaan team was one of several Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grantees invited to participate in their “Reinvent the Toilet Fair” this month at the foundation’s headquarters in Seattle.

The fair was all things toilet: from new designs to the loo itself, to waste collection innovations and everything in between. It was amazing to see what individuals and organizations developed under the banner of “Reinventing the Toilet”: from using organisms for waste disposal and generating energy from feces, to communications interventions for shifting attitudes and preferences away from open-defecation.

My personal favorite was The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s entry,  a system employing black soldier larvae to digest waste and create environmentally-friendly animal feed. The potential for creating a self-sustained system that addresses multiple critical needs while eliminating nearly all waste by-product is just too appealing to not cheer for.

The fair’s name itself suggests an informal, light-hearted, almost school fair-like atmosphere, but the scope and seriousness of sanitation intervention is certainly no laughing matter and the work of the foundation grantees certainly reinforced that.

“Good sanitation saves lives and it’s really a key to good health globally. Today, 2.5 billion people don’t have access to toilets and 1.5 million child deaths are attributed to poor sanitation conditions,” says Carl Hensman, the Program Officer for Water Sanitation and Hygiene at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Mr. Hensman went on to point out that it’s been two hundred years since the invention of the flush toilet and that little to no effort has been put into toilet engineering since.

This fact, and the opportunities surrounding it, are not lost on foundation co-chair and Microsoft founder Bill Gates: “Imagine what’s possible if we continue to collaborate, stimulate new investment in this sector, and apply our ingenuity in the years ahead,” he said in a press statement.

He, along with His Excellency the Prince of Orange, were present to observe the booths firsthand and award the winning submissions.

The Prince of Orange, Chairman of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board (UNSGAB) on Water and Sanitation, stressed the importance of sanitation innovation, saying that it is crucial in improving the health, dignity and development of those currently lacking access to toilets.

One major hurdle His Royal Highness pointed out was the perception of sanitation and the recalcitrance of leaders to be associated with it, saying that, “toilets are simply not sexy.”

However, with events like the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, and organizations like BMGF investing heavily in sanitation, that notion is slowly but surely changing.

It was both humbling and exciting to be a part of the Toilet Fair for many reasons. It allowed us the opportunity to share Project Sammaan with peers and colleagues alike, but also to act as a point of information for novices to the sanitation situation in India.

In designing the Sammaan booth, we decided to make it as interactive an experience as possible: an India-centric sanitation quiz was developed, a series of booklets featuring images and research results produced, flash sticks loaded with project videos and images, and contextual artifacts displayed. We brought an entire suitcase loaded with collateral and flew home empty-handed.

Additionally, we were provided a 4-foot by 8-foot space for signage. Rather than overload this space with text and project overview information, we printed a to-size poster featuring two compelling and alluring photos of individuals from communities we work in. This proved to be a huge draw for the booth, literally stopping some people in their tracks, compelling them to find out more about who the individuals were and, by extension, what our involvement with them was.

A highlight of the two-day event came when the foundation opened its doors to the general public, allowing curious Seattle residents to chat with all of the grantees. It’s easy to lose sight of the forest from the trees at times, but discussing the work involved in Project Sammaan with people outside of its context helped reaffirm the importance of not only our project but all of the sanitation efforts supported by the foundation as a whole.

There was an air of fraternity amongst the grantees as well, with people visiting each other’s booths out of genuine interest. Despite it being a competition amongst innovators, that did little to dampen the spirit of collaboration. One was left with a feeling of “we’re all in this together” rather than “us against them”.

That perhaps more than anything else leaves one feeling optimistic as we work towards providing adequate sanitation for the billions currently living without it.