Title:
For World's Poor, a Personal Toilet and Source of
Fertilizer
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
The name sounds funny but the idea is no joke: a
personal toilet called the Peepoo. Anders Wilhelmson
is the Swedish inventor of the idea. He wants to
give poor people in developing countries a simple
way to improve their lives.
The toilet is a single-use bag made of
environmentally friendly plastics. The inside is
treated with urea, a chemical commonly used as
fertilizer. A natural reaction kills harmful
organisms in the waste. It reduces the waste to
fertilizer that Anders Wilhelmson says is safe for
growing food.
The hotter the weather, the more quickly the waste
breaks down into ammonia to be taken up by plants.
Anders Wilhelmson says the sanitation process can
take as little as a couple of hours or as long as
two to four weeks.
He is an architect and a professor at Sweden's Royal
Institute of Technology. He became interested in the
idea of sanitation after taking part in a research
project on the social and political development of
cities. One of the most common complaints he heard
in developing countries was the lack of toilets.
He worked with others to design the invention. He
launched the project in two thousand five, and the
next year started a company called Peepoople.
The company is beginning production in Nairobi. It
expects to start selling the bags in August in Kenya
and Bangladesh. Full production could reach about
half a million bags a day.
Peepoople plans to sell the bags for two to three
cents each. Anders Wilhelmson says people can get
back ten times what they paid by using the resulting
fertilizer to grow vegetable gardens.
The United Nations says more than two and a half
billion people around the world do not have good
sanitation. Many have no choice but to use the
outdoors. Poor sanitation leads to infectious
diseases that kill more than one and a half million
people a year, mostly young children.
Jack Sim is the founder of the World Toilet
Organization, a nonprofit group working to improve
conditions.
He says the "sanitation marketplace" and inventions
like this one are the best way to help people meet a
most basic need.
And that's the VOA Special English Development
Report. You can find transcripts and MP3s of our
programs at voaspecialenglish.com. You can also add
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personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
