Happy World Toilet Day!
No, that's not a joke.
November 19 is World Toilet Day — declared by the U.N. in 2001. The goal is to call attention to the 3.4 billion people who live without "safely managed sanitation" and the more than 300 million people who engage in "open defecation" — doing their business in the great outdoors.
Now it sure would be great if everyone on Earth had a toilet. But ... unless that toilet is hooked up to an effective and sanitary sewage disposal system, it would just be a porcelain throne.
"What the world needs is not toilets," says Dr. Stephen Luby, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. "Low income communities need effective sewers and sanitation that separate their water and food from the human fecal stream."
Right now, that's not the case in many places. On a visit to a community in Nairobi, Kenya, I saw diapers floating amid the trash in a water-filled gutter on a bustling dirt road. And there were piles of "flying toilets," too. That's what it's called when people have to poop, use a plastic bag and fling it outside. It's not a new thing, by the way. People used to poop in buckets and throw it out the window in Europe in the 1800s.
The disposal of human excrement is not a new issue. "Poop has always been with us," says Luby. "We're mammals, this is what we do."
It used to be simple for hunter-gatherers to designate a place to poop far from places where communities live and prepare food and eat, he says. But with over 7 billion people on earth, we now need "remarkable engineering" to handle sewage. "
Like many things in our public health system "it's hidden from us, so costs are kind of hidden from us," Luby says.
And those systems can soak up resources: "In the U.S. we expend 15,000 liters of water per person per year to move our poop to the sewage treatment plant," he says.
Setting up a sanitation system would require a huge investment in infrastructure, especially in poor communities where funds are limited.
"I don't think there's any panacea," Luby says, calling for research into solutions — a composting toilet, a "dry sanitation solution," turning fecal matter into compost, which could be done in homes with a little sawdust and a container designed so the smell is vented out. "It'll break down pretty quickly," he says.
The World Toilet Day organizers agree that toilets aren't enough. The theme of the 2025 event is "sanitation in a changing world." The surge in rainfall because of climate change has overwhelmed many sewerage systems — including in big cities like New York, says Ann Thomas, sanitation team lead at UNICEF. "Because we have combined sewer systems, rainwater and household domestic waste combines and overloads the treatment plants" — and raw sewage ends up being dumped into local rivers. Addressing such issues will require a financial commitment, she points out.
She's also advocating for alternative "sewerage." In India, there's the twin pit solution, she says: two pits side by side that are used in an alternating fashion. Once the first pit is filled with fecal matter, the household simply switches a valve to begin using the second pit. After about a year, time, temperature and other factors will kill off the pathogens in the first pit so the human waste can be removed safely removed and used as compost.
Thomas does like the name "World Toilet Day" — it was coined to call attention to a taboo topic, and the word toilet is "funny," she says.
And coming up with a new name is a challenge. World Sanitation Day doesn't quite have the same ring.
Luby did have an idea: "World poop day — I'd endorse that."
Thomas laughs at the thought and says, "I don't know — it could be something we put on the menu for next year!" Although she's not sure it's time to retire the name World Toilet Day: "It walks the line between not being offensive and being fun."
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