Solutions and Opportunities II

 Hi, this is an extension of the previous post where I'll just be talking about one solution that may be better in addressing the safety concerns that women have.

A more Gender-appropriate solution?

Pee-Poo

Pee-Poo is a single-use, self-sanitising, biodegradable toilet that builds on the idea of flying toilets and attempts to create a market for these technologically advanced flying toilets in hopes to also reduce the impact that faeces has on the environment.  The bags are coated with urea which deactivates any pathogen (bacteria, viruses and parasites) in a month.  Once the bag has been used, it can be buried in the ground where, after weeks, the bag should degrade, leaving rich fertiliser.

This also helps with problems of waste collection. In many cases, informal settlements are often ignored when it comes to provision of safe water or the collection of waste. Pee-poo being biodegradable and lined with urea eliminates the reliance on inadequate service provision. 

It is also easy to use, I've place a series of pictures below:



3 Images of using the Pee Poo biodegradable flying toilet source

 

Limitations

There is a cost associated with Pee Poo bags which would create similar problems to the Sanergy toilets. We'd also have to assume that the users care enough about the environment to consider the additional cost instead of using their disposable, non-degradable plastic bags.

However, more importantly, Pee poo may struggle to be accepted because of what Black and Fawcett call 'the last greatest taboo' which is learning to talk about shit. Jewitt also mentions the presence of these taboos surrounding human waste which renders methods like Pee poo culturally unacceptable. 
This is also an issue for the processing aspect of Sanergy's services. 

Of course there is never a perfect one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to deeply complex issues in water and sanitation. What I hoped to show is that there is a lot more than what we see at first glance and sometimes we need to see past oversimplified, typical ideas (maybe even neo-colonial) that fail to address a more complex situation.

Finally, I'd like to thank you for keeping up with my blog. I really enjoyed writing these series of blog posts and I hope that I've managed to share my learning experience with you and help understand some of the really complex yet interesting ideas I've come across in a way that is simple, funny and pleasant to read. 


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