Associated Press
A boy walks to a latrine outside his makeshift home in a slum in Mumbai, India. The United Nations estimates that nearly 75 million people in India, and nearly 700 million worldwide, use unimproved toilets, while an additional 1 billion use no toilet at all.
Aligning itself with a group of doctoral students in California and a Sheboygan-raised environmental chemistry professor, Kohler Co. is lending a hand to an effort to reinvent the toilet.
This may prompt you to snicker. Don't. It's not funny, and the fact that nice people avoid talking about human waste contributes to what is an enormous and deadly problem.
In India, for example, the United Nations estimates that more than 600 million people don't use toilets. They don't use latrines either. They go on the ground.
And that's just one country. While significant improvement has occurred over the last 20 years, an estimated 1 billion people worldwide still practice open defecation. Another 700 million use unhygienic facilities such as "hanging latrines" that discharge directly into streams, or buckets that may simply be emptied in the streets.
All told, estimates of annual deaths from diarrhea, the majority of them spawned by feces-contaminated water, range as high as 1.5 million. Most of the victims are under 5 years old.
"The statistics about the number of children that die every day from diarrhea-related diseases are shocking," said Robert Zimmerman, a Kohler engineer who is the Wisconsin-based firm's senior channel manager for sustainability.
Can Kohler help? The company is far better known for producing upscale bathroom fixtures — the firm's mission statement and marketing cite its dedication to "gracious living" — than for focusing on basic sanitation for the world's poor.
But Kohler also is among the world's five largest manufacturers of plumbing products, with 2011 sales in the category of $1.8 billion, according to market researcher The Freedonia Group. And when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, by far the country's biggest and most generous foundation, announced its attention-grabbing "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge" in 2011, Kohler took notice.
Industry stagnant
It's been a long time since this field saw radical change. The modern flush toilet, author Rose George wrote in her 2008 book, "The Big Necessity," works in essentially the same way as the device invented in the late 1500s by Sir John Harington, a rakish English courtier, author and wit who installed one of his toilets for Queen Elizabeth I at her palace in Surrey.
And with advances in the late 18th and early 19th century, the flush toilet has worked pretty well and has contributed greatly in reducing disease and prolonging life — when it's well-connected. But it's not much help unless it feeds a system to treat the waste it swirls away. In much of the world, that sort of infrastructure doesn't exist, and may never exist.
"That's very, very expensive," said Doulaye Koné, an environmental engineer who grew up in a village in Africa's Ivory Coast and now is the Gates Foundation's senior program officer for water, sanitation and hygiene. "It's a huge capital investment. It's a very big operational cost.... It will work in very few (developing world) cities."
So the foundation called for off-the-grid designs without connections to water, sewer or electrical lines. It issued grants to eight universities, including one to the California Institute of Technology and a team led by environmental science professor Michael Hoffmann.
The plan: Develop a self-contained toilet and waste treatment system powered by a solar panel generating enough energy to store for use at night.
Kohler contacted Caltech and offered to supply fixtures for the prototype. In doing that, Zimmerman said, the company found out that Hoffmann was from Sheboygan — he'd graduated from North High School in the '60s — and knew Kohler well.
"It was good serendipity there," Zimmerman said.
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