This story was originally published in Public Works.
The World Toilet Organization has convened just once in the U.S. since former Singapore businessman Jack Sim founded the non-profit in 2001 (Philadelphia, 2010). Our enviable living standard comes from thousands of men and women toiling daily on the unglamorous but life-saving work of maintaining sanitary and storm sewer collection systems and water and wastewater treatment plants.
Other parts of the world aren’t so lucky. Estimates of how many people die every year from germ-laden drinking water range from two million to four million, but even one death is one too many. Many non-profits and nongovernmental organizations look for inexpensive but effective ways to disinfect arsenic-laced well water and E coli-tainted surface water. Sim’s working the problem from the other end – literally – by working to end open defecation: the practice of relieving oneself in a field, bush, or nearby stream.
Of course, it’s hard to use a toilet when one doesn’t exist. U.S. manufacturers brag their designs flush anything and, as any public sewer utility that regularly pulls and cleans pumps knows, they do. According to the United Nations, though, almost five billion people – one in three – don’t have one. Most live in places that, due to insufficient funding and/or impossible logistics, will never have centralized collection and treatment or septic systems.
That’s where a new international standard comes in: ISO 30500.
In 2011, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation challenged engineers to design a toilet that treats waste without water or power and costs less than 5 cents per day per user. Because countries without centralized sewers lack the resources to investigate and install interim designs that may not meet future requirements, ISO and the foundation are standardizing “prefabricated integrated treatment unit” design and manufacture before companies introduce products – a highly unusual approach. “Once the fundamentals have been taken care of, it leaves more time for further development of the features that really make a product stand out in the market,” writes ISO Communication Head Katie Bird in November 2017.
These aren’t portable toilets, the design and manufacture of which are governed in the U.S. by the American National Standards Institute since the 1930s (anyone remember outhouses?). They’re completely new: They must look like a traditional toilet but manage solids, liquids, and gases without connecting to a networked sewer system.
Thirty-one countries gave ISO Project Committee 305 (non-sewered sanitation systems) input on the standard, which is expected to be published this year. When it is, the world will be closer than ever to achieving universal access to safely managed sanitation services and safely treated wastewater.
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