I bet you wouldn’t normally eat food that has been grown in body waste (read – excreta). But that’s just the solution, a Swedish entrepreneur has developed. It’s a biodegradable plastic bag that’s a single use pouch for your nature’s calls. Thanks to some simple chemistry gets its second life as fertilizer for crops.

It seems just the solution for under-developed countries of Asia and Africa. Especially when you consider that 40% of the global population does not have access to proper toilets, mostly in Asia and Africa.
Disposable of human waste is a hygienic as well as a space worry for poorer countries which lack the infrastructure. Could this be the ‘bag of wonder’?

Anders Wilhelmson, an architect and professor in Stockholm, is the guy behind the bag dubbed Peepoo. No marks for guessing where the name comes from! The technology is as simple as it is novel.

After the first use as a toilet bag, it can be knotted and buried. Thereafter, a layer of urea crystals breaks down the waste into fertilizer, killing off disease-producing pathogens found in feces. The fertilizer can in turn be used to grow crops. The planned selling price of the bag might be around 2 or 3 cents. The same cost as a normal plastic bag.

Mr. Wilhelmson says,

“Not only is it sanitary, they can reuse this to grow crops.”

Use of waste plastic bags is nothing new. Slum dwellers have long used it to dispose of waste. Mr. Wilhelmson observed similar habits in Kenya where people call them ‘flyaway toilets’ because they disposed of them by throwing it towards the garbage dumps. That’s how the idea of an environmentally friendly alternative came about.

Low cost toilets have long been a focus area in the developing world. Alternatives like a public sanitation system are generally failing because of poor penetration. Sulabh International in India is an example of success but it also has not been able to beat the tremendous challenges of population and age old habits.

That’s where this very low cost option could fit in. Of course, it will take a major paradigm shift in habits to make people turn away from what they have been doing so far.

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