A group of students in California are working with bathroom product company Kohler to reinvent the toilet.
This might lead you to laugh. Don’t. It’s not funny, and the fact that nice people don't talk about human waste makes an enormous problem even worse.
In India, for example, the United Nations estimates that more than 600 million people don’t use toilets. They don’t use pits, called latrines, either. They go on the ground.
And that’s just one country. There have been big improvements in the past 20 years, but an estimated 1 billion people worldwide still go out in the open. Another 700 million use unclean types of bathrooms. Some use “hanging latrines” that dump directly into streams, or buckets that are simply emptied in the streets.
When the waste is disposed in that way, it can get into water and make it dirty. When people drink the dirty water it can cause diarrhea, which kills as many as 1.5 million people each year. The majority of those deaths are from water made dirty by human waste. Most of the victims are under 5 years old.
The Challenge To Reinvent
Can Kohler help? The company is mostly known for selling expensive sinks and faucets. Making toilets for the world’s poor is not what made the company famous.