The Big Necessity

In the early twenty-first century, when surgery can be done
microscopically and human achievement seems limitless, 2.6 billion
people lack the most basic thing that human dignity requires. Four in
ten people in the world have no toilet. They must do their business
instead on roadsides, in the bushes, wherever they can. Yet human feces
in water supplies contribute to one in ten of the world’s communicable
diseases. A child dies from diarrhoea – usually brought on by
fecal-contaminated food or water – every 15 seconds.

Meanwhile, the western world luxuriates in flush toilets; in toilets
that play music or can check blood pressure, where the flush is a
thoughtless thing, and anything that can go down a sewer – nappies,
motorbikes, goldfish – does. In these times, Japanese women routinely
use a device called a Flush Princess to mask the sound of their bodily
functions; while in China millions of people happily use public toilets
with no doors. The Big Necessity – as one Mumbai toilet builder called
the toilet – is the account of my travels through the profoundly
intriguing but stupidly neglected world of the disposal of human waste,
which houses characters like Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet
Organization; Wang Ming Ying, who is attempting to alleviate
environmental devastation and deforestation in China by persuading
rural Chinese to install biogas digesters, which produce cooking gas
from human feces; Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, whose NGO Sulabh has built
half a million toilets in India, as well as the world’s only museum of
toilets; and the flushers of London and New York’s sewers, who scoff at
roaches but hate rats nearly as much as they hate congealed cooking fat
and tri-ply toilet paper.