The trouble with toilets in the developing world is not that there are so few. It's that they fill up, and when they do, most local governments lack the money, the technology, and the incentive to properly manage the waste. Instead, it gets dumped, untreated, into the nearest waterway, leaving the estimated 2.6 billion people in the world who lack access to basic sanitation susceptible to all manner of bacteria, disease, and parasites.
"Building a toilet as a standalone intervention is like putting a Band-Aid on a gushing wound," says Ashley Murray. "Maybe it buys time to get to the hospital, but it's not the solution to the problem."
Murray is the founder of Waste Enterprisers, an Accra, Ghana-based start-up that plans to turn raw human waste, or fecal sludge, into biofuel pellets, a commodity that sells for $200 a ton in some parts of Europe. The for-profit company operates on the premise that human waste is the one truly infinite resource. Find a way to reuse and monetize that resource, and we may be able to stem the global sanitation crisis where it starts.
"The biggest bottleneck in sanitation is the financial model," Murray says. "The money is never around to cover the cost of waste-treatment facilities. I thought, If we're really going to make progress, we have to find a way to integrate a financial incentive to keep these systems going."
Murray has spent more than a decade studying sanitation and has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group. She knew that some developed countries were already finding ways to turn sewage sludge, a byproduct of wastewater treatment, into fuel. The same wasn't being done with raw human waste.