In much of the world, people do not have access to toilets and sewers. To make these places safer, innovators look for cheap, easy-to-install solutions.
"Worldwide, 2.3 billion people don’t have access to a toilet," Alia Dharssi reports for Next City. Because traditional sewage systems can be expensive and take time to build, inventors are looking for ways to give people access to sanitary toilets without them.
Inspired by seeing this issue first hand in Bangladesh, Daigo Ishiyama took on the challenge. "Ishiyama and his team developed a line of cheap plastic toilets with self-closing trapdoors that separate people using latrines from the sewage beneath them," Dharssi reports.
Another group, based out of Kenya, engineered a different solution. "Sanivation installs container-based toilets in homes in informal settlements in Naivasha, a city of north of Nairobi, for free, hauls away the sludge from them for a small monthly fee and processes the waste into fuel briquettes," Dharssi writes.
FULL STORY: In Cities Without Enough Toilets, Innovators Look Beyond Sewers
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City of Albany
UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
City of Piedmont, CA
Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research