We eat, we drink, and whatever
we put into our bodies, it comes out. And we cannot speak about it?
It makes no sense. I don't say poop, I donít say toilet
or excrement, because it doesn't help. I wanna talk to you
today about toilets. Weíre not allowed to say sh*t. And thatís part of the problem. We refuse the words
because we refuse the reality. On average, a human produces more than
70 kilos of excrement per year. Globally, that represents
550 million tonnes of waste which must be
evacuated and treated. Excrement management worldwide poses
a sanitation and ecological challenge which we almost
never talk about. And yet, you probably
donít know that weíre experiencing
a huge toilet revolution. 10 years ago, Bill Gates, who
explores the world for his foundation, discovered that poop kills. According to the WHO, half of the worldís population
doesnít have safe toilets. Nearly 700 million human
beings defecate outside. The problem is
that poor sanitation causes diarrhea, dysentery,
hepatitis A, and typhoid. It kills nearly 400,000
children each year. Bill Gates thought
he could fix that by inventing a new kind
of toilet for these countries. They smell terrible. No, thatís not the kind
of toilet heís financing. In 2011, Bill Gates launched a
major international competition called Reinvent the Toilet. The toilet of the
future must be able to remove all the harmful
pathogens from human waste and recover resources like
energy, clean water, and nutrients. They must also work without a
network, without running water, and almost
without electricity. To see these toilets
financed by Gates, we went to Switzerland,
to a kind of Harvard for pee, a university which
specializes in separating fecal matter
and urine in toilets in order to better
recover all the good things contained in the
liquid we produce. He wanted to come up with
this new sanitation system, he consulted some friends
and they came out with a system, how it could look like. How to use physical
chemical processes, new processes to
treat the excreta. And he actually sent
this sketch, this idea out with this invitation to participate
to reinvent the toilet challenge. And it was extremely
technological. I think something like supercritical
water oxidation or electrolysis. This process really fit
nicely in this picture, this plan. The Eawag Institute is participating
in Bill Gatesís competition because, for decades, they
have been a global reference in research on
water and sanitation. They invent a lot of
machines and systems to turn urine
into fertilizer. This is a urine separating
toilet, safe, produced by love. This is the collection tank where we
collect the urine from this building. This is the biological reactor
where we stabilize the urine. In this column, pharmaceuticals
are removed with activated carbon. After pharmaceutical removal,
the urine is stored here and later brought to the
distiller for concentration. This is the final
fertilizer product, Aurin. At the outset, Eawag was
going to call its fertilizer made from Swiss
studentsí urine Urina. An in-house communications
manager suggested they switch the letters
to draw inspiration from the Latin word
for Gold instead. Thatís why they
chose Aurin. To be clear, the
Eawag Institute separates urine and fecal matter
and collects studentsí urine, because, Number One, itís easier to
treat our waste when itís separated. Number Two, most of the nutrients
are concentrated in the urine. And most of the
bacteriological bombs, the ones that kill children,
are concentrated in the feces. One afternoon,
we found ourselves at one of the biggest
sh*t factories in the world. The Seine Aval wastewater
treatment plant in Paris. Here you see the sludge
produced at our facility. That pile is two days' worth. The sludge will be carbonized,
which will make it hygienic. Then we can spread it on agricultural
fields. Have you got enough? The fact that people like
Bill Gates want to invent almost dry toilets which
separate urine and fecal matter always brings us
back to one question. Why did rich countries
choose the flush toilet, which uses so much water, and a central sewer system terminating
at a wastewater treatment plant? Until the mid-19th century,
in major European cities, the most common custom was to
empty your bucket out the window. The streets were so filthy
that the scientists of the day ended up wondering if the bad odors
themselves were causing the epidemics. That was called
the miasma theory. In 1858, London was sweltering,
and the level of the Thames, where all the excrement
was dumped, was at its lowest. The stench
was so strong that the members of Parliament
feared theyíd fall ill. It took powerful people smelling
the odor for the tide to turn. This event, called
The Great Stink, was the spark which
launched a vast undertaking. The city was gutted to create
a centralized sewer system. Thousands of kilometers were dug at
the same time in several major cities. Like in Paris, which had nearly
3,000 kilometers of sewer pipes. The same period saw the
invention of the flush toilet, the height of efficiency
when it came to making what you didnít want
to see anymore disappear. Disgust for fecal matter
is a human constant. And our super-expensive and
sophisticated system does all it can to evacuate excrement. Everyday we produce about 1 over liter
of urine and about 200 grams of sh*t. Why do we want to add more gallons
of water to make the problem bigger and then go and filter
it out. It must be crazy. When youíre working
on the toilet issue, you constantly hear
about Mister Toilet, a businessman in Singapore
who, at the age of 40, realized that all he had
done was accumulate money. Based on the life expectancy
of a Singaporean man, he calculated how many
days he had left to live, and he decided to devote
them to a single cause - the revolution of
sanitary facilities. So when I was 3 or 4 years
old, we live in Kampong which is a slum village and we
do not have toilet in our own house, the toilets is in a row of huts
with a British bucket system. So you go up a few steps,
you are squatting on the planks and then you
poop into a bucket. When the bucket truck
comes to collect it and replace it with
a fresh new one, then everybody
wants to go to the toilet. But after a while it is
full of other peopleís sh*t. And different colors... and then you
have the sanitary pads with the blood, the toilet paper, and the
flies immediately come. It is very, very disgusting
and very disturbing. Mister Toilet
put all his weight behind the battle against
sanitation inequality. He wanted the whole world
to take on the issue. He founded the World
Toilet Organization, through which he talks
about poop on every continent. Over the last 10 years,
the stars have aligned. The UNís Sustainable
Development Goals have put sanitation at the
center of global concerns. For NGOs, for the people whoíve
always worked in development, itís a toilet moment they
feared would never come. The Bill Gates Foundation funded
several studies, research labs, in the field of sanitation, to try to
gather more data on this subject. I wasn't remotely
shocked to see someone outside the
field showing interest. It's always good to have
a different kind of actor in the development sector, someone who challenges
our own development practices. There's a complementary dynamic
in this kind of approach. All development experts
will tell you: For decades, rich
countries have been digging dry toilets in poor
countries to bury waste. And they have a very
hard time convincing states that itís a vital
public-health issue. All that was true
until 2 October 2014. Indian Prime Minister Narendra
Modi chose Gandhiís birthday to announce the launch
of the biggest-ever latrine-building campaign. In his speech, he said
that a nation like India, which sends its own
satellites into space, can no longer allow its people
to relieve themselves outside. The figures are stark. At the time, of the 900
million people in the world who had no sanitary facilities,
40% were Indian. Thatís not only due to
the vastness of the country or its lack of
infrastructure. The high prevalence of
outdoor defecation in India is also due to a
cultural problem. Dr. Pathak created
Sulabh International, which wants to put
an end to a tradition thatís lasted thousands
of years in India. The one which involves
leaving the handling of poop to the Untouchable caste. When I was a child, I touched an
Untouchable, and for that matter, my grandmother forced me to swallow
cow dung and to drink cow urine. The ancient sacred
texts of Hinduism required a man to defecate
an arrowís flight from his home, and, if there was unfortunately
excrement very close to your home, it was considered absolutely
unclean to take care of it. So, the Untouchables went from
house to house to pick up your feces. In Rajasthan, I picked
up people's fecal matter. When we were hungry or thirsty,
people gave us water or leftover food, but without ever touching us. Or
they'd toss some coins at our feet. We really suffered, but we
couldn't do anything else. It's what we've always done,
generation after generation. There has never been
another option for us. Had we tried to sell vegetables,
no one would have bought them. Dr. Pathak, himself a member
of the very high Brahmin caste, decided to go against his own class
interests and to break with tradition. Now, I'm at peace. In New Delhi, his organization hosts
a school for children of Untouchables. Everything is devoted to
showing that excrement has value, that it can be
used to make gas for cooking, for lighting,
for feeding plants. Dr. Pathak wants to
convince his fellow citizens that toilets are a desirable space
and that you should have one at home rather than
defecating outdoors. He has even created
a toilet museum. The business which generates the
money for Dr. Pathakís organization is public pay toilets, thousands
of which are spread all over India, employing more
than 35,000 people. Heís even creating the
Taj Mahal of public urinals. All this so that the Hindu
culture of hating excrement no longer hinders
toilet adoption. In this matter, Dr. Pathak inspired
Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The campaign is called Swachh Bharat,
which means Clean India Mission. For its emblem, it uses
Gandhiís little round glasses. Itís an unprecedented
construction effort. Tens of millions of rudimentary
dry toilets are being built in India. Itís also a massive
communications campaign. The prime minister was filmed sweeping
streets and inaugurating toilets. If you change nothing,
nothing will change. A Bollywood movie was
even made about a woman who doesnít want to marry her fiancÈ
if he doesnít have home latrines. Amitabh Bachan, the Alain Delon of
Mombai, became the face of toilets. Itís about converting a
nation to defecating in a hole. And five years later, on 2 October
2019, on Gandhiís 150th birthday, Narendra Modi once again
addressed his people and the world. He announced that no one
defecated outside anymore. The United Nations,
the NGOs, Bill Gates, everyone pretended
to believe that, so as not to upset the
worldís biggest democracy. In India, the promise and
the delivery are not the same. Today, out of the
110 million toilets, it is anybodyís guess
whether it is 50 million, or 30 million or 80 million,
we do not know. I think the only thing
we can know is that the World Bank has promised to
distribute 2 billion dollars to India if they can prove that
the toilets has been used. And today I think they still havenít distributed
the 2 billion dollar reward. To serve his own
political agenda, Narendra Modi chose to
massively subsidize latrines, which often went unused. To this day in India, people are still defecating
by the side of the road. So we embarked on this adventure
with the Gates Foundation to discover the
code of bad odors, to understand how to
provide a scientific solution for first-time toilet users
in India, China, and elsewhere. So, we did some science together.
The adventure lasted several years. For months, Firmenichís
researchers travelled to collect fecal
odors at the source, in latrines in India, Kenya,
Uganda, and South Africa. From this fetid
round-the-world trip, they brought back
the conviction that, beyond climatic
and food specificities, there was a combination of five
compounds which, cleverly balanced, could reproduce the
exact odor of excrement. Yes, this precious
nose which generally designs the essences
of our luxury perfumes has been assigned
to the effluvia of feces. Taste and smell
are tied to emotions. So, could we bring positive
emotions to the poorest among us who lack access to toilets? The technique produced a
powder to throw in the bowl, a spray, and a
hanging air-freshener, and is already sold in several
African and Asian countries. It was tested in India,
in the city of Pune, where a start-up is developing a new toilet-bus model
exclusively for women. Thatís a fundamental aspect
revealed by this toilet revolution: Lack of access to sanitation has a much greater impact
on women than on men. And BÈrangËre
Magarinos-Ruchat, in a world mostly made up of
male engineers and technicians, is an activist
for this cause. The lack of access to
toilets and hygiene for women is definitely the central
issue in this conversation. For some women, it might mean
either getting up very early, before the rest of the family,
to go and relieve themselves in the field next to their
house or their village, or waiting to go
late at night. That's dangerous. We know it has led and
still leads to sexual violence, but also to feminine-hygiene
problems, infections. That's why solutions like
the buses are really great, because there are diaper
stations, information about AIDS, information about how to use
feminine hygiene products, assistance and support for
women in their personal hygiene. You get none of
that out in a field. Nor can you wash your hands, and, as
we have all learned in recent months, that can create
major health problems. Durban, a South African city
with 4 million inhabitants, by the Indian Ocean,
is playing a crucial role in the ongoing
toilet revolution. Because of the endemic
drought in South Africa, but also, more surprisingly,
because of the end of apartheid. My challenge was to prepare
for the new South Africa. And, as you know, in apartheid, you had a central city which
was mainly white people, surrounded by a sea of poverty,
which was mainly African people, many of whom
had no services. From 1996 until 2000, it was easy
to motivate for money for water, because that
was the big issue. But we started to realize that
just bringing water to families was causing another problem,
a public health problem. Because then it was creating
sewage and the sewage was just running through the houses
and causing problems. And then in 2002, we had a cholera
outbreak, and that changed everything. Suddenly the politicians
said: We need sanitation. With Neil McLeod
at the helm, the municipality of Durban
has become a pioneer in the separation of urine
and fecal matter, to save water. Itís also testing
alternative solutions to the Western flush toilet and
water-borne sewage system. A research group at the
University of Kwazulu-Natal is Neil McLeodís
experimental branch. Naturally, one day, Bill Gates
came across Neil McLeod, his pollution-research group, and the
crazy sanitation history of Durban. Then we got that phone
call in December 2009. Please be at the Hilton
at 6am, in the morning, there's somebody coming to see
you, and you can't tell anybody. I thought it was going
to be Bill Gates's father and out walked
Bill Gates: Hello Neil, what do
you want to show me? Why you keep talking to my staff
that theyíre in the wrong sector. And I said, well, you know,
my answer to him was: I don't need your money.
I need your influence. And we took him out.
Chris Buckley came with me, and we showed him what we were doing
and how our partnership was evolving. And he went back and he started
investing in sanitation and the rest is history. He started the
Reinvent the Toilet challenge, and we became the engineering field
test center here for all the work. And that's continued on as
we've made all the advances. So, when the Reinvent the Toilet
competition was launched by the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation, Durban and its
hundreds of shantytowns were chosen to test
the competing toilets designed by Chinese, American,
and Swiss universities. There were technical challenges,
but there were sociological ones, too. Among the 10 systems tested
in the shantytowns of Durban, a Chinese company
had a spectacular failure. In China, you donít throw
the toilet paper in the bowl. In South Africa, you do. Very quickly, their brand-new
system broke down in Durban, and it took days to
get it back in service. We had a lot of
sludge build up. So those were things that we
had to deal with on the ground and figure out
how to solve. And ultimately, it sort
of came to the realization that the way that the
process was designed just wasn't applicable
to South Africa. That is one of
the challenges when bringing in a system
from another country, and bringing it into
a developing country, where the municipalities
generally do not have the skills or the capacity to maintain
and operate these systems. So yeah, there's something
that has to be looked at, when you're bringing
in a new technology: Are you able to maintain it?
Are you able to operate it? Do you have the necessary
manpower to do it? Hello, Iím Bill Gates,
chairman of Microsoft. In this video, you are
going to see the future. Bill Gates has a major
technological bent. You canít really
reproach him for that. Itís that bent which has made him
one of the richest men in the world from selling computer
operating systems to most of us. When he decided to reinvent
the toilet so that it could be used even in countries without
water-borne sewer systems, Bill Gatesís geeky side
naturally came out. The universities
which work for him are developing
chemical solutions, reactors to destroy the
bacteria in fecal matter, electrolysis-based
treatment walls. Their toilets end up
looking like spaceships. The injected air pushes the
fecal matter into the reactor. The valve closes, and the
reaction occurs. It's combustion. The fecal matter is then heated
to between 400 and 600∞C, at about 300
bars of pressure. I think originally, Bill Gates
was thinking in this way. He told us when he was young,
a computer filled up several rooms to be able only to compute
a little bit of information. Today the computing power on
our cellphone is able to do the job of very, very big IBM
computers long ago. Therefore, his belief is when
technology can be introduced, then everything becomes
smaller and smaller. The only difference between
the computer and the sh*t is that the computer is in bytes, and you can just keep on growing
the bytes without growing the size. Whereas the poop is in atoms,
you cannot digitize sh*t. You will always physically
have that 200g of sh*t every time. Well, I brought a little exhibit here,
this is a container of human feces. Iím famous that once in a
speech I released mosquitoes. This weíre going
to keep in the jar. But you know, I think,
even though itís very stark, itís good to be reminded
that inside there could be over 200 million
rotavirus particles, 20 billion shigella bacteria and
100,000 parasitic worm eggs, of which you got a
little animation... In November 2018, when Bill Gates
placed a jar full of fecal matter on the podium at his conference at
the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing, the billionaire proved that heís
a master of communications. He achieved the unthinkable:
Putting toilets on the global agenda. He also successfully
imposed a new narrative: That excrement
can be profitable if itís at the heart of new industries
which produce energy and fertilizers. The Toilet Board Coalition
was built on the dream of being able to transform
poor peopleís poop into money. One of the main ideas behind
the Toilet Board Coalition is that the collection of fecal matter
in poor countries will be enough to create sufficient energy,
like biogas or electricity, to finance the whole
sanitation system. In Beijing, everything
seemed to be going great. The universities were proudly
presenting their new toilet solutions, and Bill Gates announced
that the technologies that his foundation
had financed were ready to be
adopted by the market. Our goal is to create a multi-billion
dollars business opportunity that at some
point is getting by without any sort of
philanthropic grant money, that it really just evolves
into companies competing to buy the best product
using these new paradigm. Three years later,
in a world in which weíre questioning
our development models, priorities have changed. The hyper-technological solutions
advocated by Bill Gates are having a hard time finding
a foothold in the real world. Theyíre probably too costly, and they
donít challenge our waste management. It was an afternoon
like any other at the home of biologist
Philippe Morier-Genoud in a village in the
Swiss Alpine foothills. There heís testing
experimental toilet models which use nature,
particularly earthworms, for fecal-matter
treatment solutions. We've completely
lost touch with the sight and the
proximity of our excrement. We excrete, we flush, and
it all disappears. It's gone. We don't what happens to it.
There are no risks, no odors. When you see a field big enough
to feed a cow throughout the year, there's 500 kg of
meat on that cow, and 3 tonnes of earthworms
right there under its feet. Itís the earthworms who are hard
at work. Worms are bio-reactors. Even their shape reveals that -
they're long intestines. Even more so than us,
they're guts packed in a thin skin. They're even better
bio-reactors than we are. So much so that
this fecal matter, inhabited and colonized by
mushrooms and earthworms, becomes edible
again for worms. They eat what they excrete,
four times or five times. Philippe Morier-Genoud uses
earthworms in his home-made toilets to kill bacteria and render
the fecal matter harmless. He relieves
himself in a tube to give his vegetables the good
nutrients contained in his urine. You might think that this
Professor Calculus of the restroom, this earthworm fanatic,
isnít a very serious person, and that heís not going to solve
the global toilet problem. But then Philippe invited us
to follow him to Geneva. This is a building in
the heart of the city. Its residents decided to develop a
more ecological sanitation system which could reinject wastewater
into very low-volume flush toilets. They called Philippe Morier-Genoud,
who rounded up his worms. What do you envision? At first,
it was just in your house. Now it's for 100 people,
then for for 300. And then? Buildings with 300 people
would be pretty good. After that, the next
thing, the neighborhood. You could do this in
a whole neighborhood. Look at the lovely earthworms.
A nice big bunch of them. Itís a big pool in the
buildingís courtyard, full of straw, excrement,
and earthworms, a giant filter which makes it
possible to treat organic matter and even a lot
of chemicals. The earthworms eat, eliminate,
and re-ingest everything dangerous, purifying it. The compost can then safely
be used to fertilize the gardens. It doesnít smell bad. At most, thereís a slight smell
of humus wafting in the pit. There is maintenance, right? If it's in a city, don't you have to
take some of it out from time to time? No, everything
is transformed. Here we have the decomposition
of all the components, of all the sugar polymers
into carbon dioxide and water. And all the residual mineral salts
are flushed out with the excess water. When you see this hyper-modern
building in central Geneva, its 38 dwellings, its 140 residents,
youíd never imagine that there are millions of worms on
clean-up duty in the courtyard. Our goal is to get
water that is cleaner than what comes out
of the treatment plant - at least as clean,
but cleaner, if possible. That's not hard to achieve, because water from
treatment plants isn't very clean. It's decanted and rapidly
digested through injecting oxygen, which helps develop bacteria
that consume residual sugars. That's all easy to digest. We're at the first stage
of wastewater treatment. This involves removing the large
waste arriving from the sewers. We find tree branches,
sanitary wipes, all kinds of waste. It's vital that we remove that
from the water before treating it. At first, you focus on the
pee-poop side of this story. But then you realize that itís
about something else entirely. This sanitation revolution challenges
our entire waste-management system. Because all sorts of things
end up in our treatment plants. What is wastewater? It's the water generated
by our household activities - toilet water, gray water,
from our daily activities. It's also the water used for
artisanal and industrial purposes. Lastly, it's rainwater which
washes the air and the city and then flows into the
collectors. It's all of that. We're at the activated-sludge
treatment stage. It removes nitrogen and
phosphorus from the water. How do we do it?
Again, we use nature. We cultivate the naturally
occurring bacteria in the water. Of course, in addition to feces, wastewater carries a whole
bunch of chemical products called micropollutants, and
theyíre much harder to treat. The micropollutants in our sludge
- and this is the problem - come from many different sources,
ourselves in particular. What you were saying is quite right. When we go about our business, when we're washing our
dishes or washing our hair, when we weed our garden,
remove moss from our roof, etc., those activities lead us,
without really realizing it, to use many compounds,
many components. Today I get to clean
the bathroom bowl. Stuck with the nastiest job
in the house? Make it vanish. Vanish? Total action Vanish. Try it! See, total action Vanish lifts off
water stains, disinfects, bleaches... Itís true that,
for decades, we were encouraged to throw
as many chemicals as possible into our toilet bowls, to
eradicate the slightest bacterium. The problem is that
micropollutants are getting worse as humankind invents
new compounds, and produces new compounds
without having studied the harm they might do to
human health and the environment. We're creating an
increasingly serious problem. Not only are these synthetic compounds
not removed in treatment plants, they also accumulate in places
where we really don't want them to. At the outset, this
toilet revolution stemmed from the idea that
we have to give sanitary facilities to those who
donít yet have any. Itís also about giving developing
countries small treatment plants to avoid investing
colossal sums for water-borne sewage systems
and giant treatment plants. Especially in South Africa
where we don't have the space, the facilities to put in more big large central
wastewater treatment works. And it makes more sense
economically and also environmentally to have on-site sanitation treatment,
or decentralized treatment systems, rather than putting
an extensive piping to take everything
to a central place. It's much better
to treat it at source. And if you can take that and
produce something useful out of it, that's even better. But the truth is that new toilets,
new wastewater-treatment models, also solve our
first-world problems. Decentralization, treatment in
each neighborhood or each residence could enable us to better control
what we release into nature. And maybe it would
make us more responsible. I really believe that with on-site
treatment, decentralized treatment we can really improve the
overall sanitation system. There will always be a place
for centralized systems, definitely. But not for every location. We
also have to rethink the water use. Now we have the water supply
and itís such a big achievement that we have fresh water,
drinking water supplied by pipes. But do we really need
drinking water for toilet flushing? And do we really need 50 liters per
person per day for toilet flushing? No, we donít need that. So we
can actually recycle water. So in large buildings we
can treat the grey water, the water from the bathroom
and the kitchen, not the toilet water, we can treat that rather easily
to reuse it for toilet flushing. We should do that.
We should explore new options. So, itís not just about the
little boysí or little girlsí room. For the last 10 years, this
broad rethink of the way in which we manage
our most basic waste is a definite
point of no return. Around the world, the
vast majority of wastewater, more than 80%,
goes untreated. Our stool, our urine contribute to
the over-fertilization of the oceans, to excessive algae growth, and
to the asphyxiation of the sea floor. The way in which we manage
our excrement isnít insignificant. Itís the very
heart of life. Fecal matter and urine have
always fed the ground which feeds us. When fear of disease
in cities led us to banish our waste
as far away as possible, we replaced natural fertilizers
with chemical fertilizers. When we stopped giving back
to the soil what we took out of it, because we started
living in cities, and it cost too much to
return to the earth things which should return to the
earth, we created instability. We might not all end
up with earthworms at home to eat
our excrement. But this idea that feces
should return to the ground, that we canít content ourselves
with getting rid of these substances without transforming them,
reintegrating them into the life cycle will certainly be
the foundation for the launch of the
upcoming toilet revolution.
