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India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

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Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#171

Post by hinkley »

yourapostasy wrote: post #105
hinkley wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently reading a reprint of a 110 year old book about how China and Japan have kept their farms fertile for 4000 years. The basics are lots of elbow grease, and continuous application of river silt and (aged?) animal and human sewage. It occurs to me that this book predates both industrialization (factory effluent) and the last cholera outbreaks. Which makes me wonder what sort of sweeping agricultural practic…

Would appreciate a title if you run across it again and remember this request. The term of art in the West is "anthroponics". A related subreddit [1] seems to currently focus upon using human urine in agriculture (with some really fascinating results of using watermelon seeds to sterilize the urine). Human feces given to black soldier flies and feeding their larvae to chickens and tilapia as a high-protein supplement…

Farmers of Forty Centuries by F. H. King

Reprinted by Dover in 2004

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#172

Post by ticviking »

up_and_up wrote: post #121
avar wrote: post #16

> Unfortunately, in many places, it’s not > feasible to lay down sewer pipes or build > treatment facilities. [...] But giving > people access to toilets isn’t enough. You > also have to persuade them to use the > toilets. I can't find it now, but there was a news video making the rounds a year or two ago that showed that this problem is much more fundamental than that. It showed a Indians in a tiny village who were…

> But somehow the problem persists, it's unbelievable. Before you get too high and mighty there.... Not long ago (1996) here in the USA, they were still removing all the outhouses that had been positioned directly over fresh-water streams all over Appalachia. See "Straight Piping". [1] Its easy to judge poor people in other countries, we forget how recently we were (and maybe still are) making similar mistakes. [1] -…

So how was the practice ended?

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#173

Post by trprog »

anigbrowl wrote: post #165
kirrent wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally in the linked Wikipedia article: "Although cast-iron cookware is known to transmit iron to food during cooking, the cost to obtain it is prohibitive for most of the individuals living in poverty in rural Cambodia, who earn less than $1 per day." In what world would a cast iron pan be cheaper than a small ingot?

It seems like it would be simpler and easier to just give them skillets than faffing around with ingots. If one is worried about the perception of value or suspicion of gifts one could offer to trade them for their existing cookware.

Of course it would be simpler and easier but who is going to pay for it?

Cambodia is a nation of around 15 million people and a large proportion of them are affected by iron deficiency. You are talking about trying to get skillets/ingots into the hands of hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions.

Even cutting the cost of each item by $1 reduces the overall cost to either the organization(s) running the program or the poor people of Cambodia by hundreds of thousands of dollars. The organizations running this program and the poor of Cambodia aren't sitting on an infinite pot of money.

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#174

Post by 4684499 »

kirrent wrote: post #149
4684499 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't they just use iron pans? It's more affordable and more natural, you don't have to put something in your food, and it's being heated directly at the bottom. Did they just invent this iron fish to create more jobs?

Literally in the linked Wikipedia article: "Although cast-iron cookware is known to transmit iron to food during cooking, the cost to obtain it is prohibitive for most of the individuals living in poverty in rural Cambodia, who earn less than $1 per day." In what world would a cast iron pan be cheaper than a small ingot?

What world? I don't know. I searched and find this website before commenting: http://www.luckyironfish.com/shop , which says It costs $25 each, while you can find $22 iron pan on Amazon.

Sure it might be cheaper in Cambodia, then the price of iron pans would be lower as well.

They didn't just use an ingot, they shaped the ingot into a lucky fish, which also costs money.

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#175

Post by trprog »

avar wrote: post #16

> Unfortunately, in many places, it’s not > feasible to lay down sewer pipes or build > treatment facilities. [...] But giving > people access to toilets isn’t enough. You > also have to persuade them to use the > toilets. I can't find it now, but there was a news video making the rounds a year or two ago that showed that this problem is much more fundamental than that. It showed a Indians in a tiny village who were…

You are thinking of the problem in a sciencey, evidence based way. In particular for illiterate, uneducated people there is often a huge weight given to superstition and traditional/existing ways of doing things even in the face of evidence.

It is a surprisingly hard nut to crack, sometimes even among literate educated people. If it weren't a lot of religious extremism and bigotry would not exist.

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#176

Post by nonamechicken »

redsummer wrote: post #126

Hinduism is a big problem. The Ganges is literally a river of shit - it has 120 times the safe level of fecal matter. Yet Hindus regard it as purifying and it's considered holy to have a dip in it. When you have a culture like that, it's going to be hard to persuade people to not shit in the water they drink.

Majority of Hindus have never even seen Ganges. Almost everyone in my state baths twice a day, washes their hands/mouth before and after eating, and we have been using bidets for 15 years at least.

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#177

Post by kaybe »

anigbrowl wrote: post #165
kirrent wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally in the linked Wikipedia article: "Although cast-iron cookware is known to transmit iron to food during cooking, the cost to obtain it is prohibitive for most of the individuals living in poverty in rural Cambodia, who earn less than $1 per day." In what world would a cast iron pan be cheaper than a small ingot?

It seems like it would be simpler and easier to just give them skillets than faffing around with ingots. If one is worried about the perception of value or suspicion of gifts one could offer to trade them for their existing cookware.

The weight also plays a big role, especially since they're carried around a lot.

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#178

Post by wavefunction »

4684499 wrote: post #174
kirrent wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally in the linked Wikipedia article: "Although cast-iron cookware is known to transmit iron to food during cooking, the cost to obtain it is prohibitive for most of the individuals living in poverty in rural Cambodia, who earn less than $1 per day." In what world would a cast iron pan be cheaper than a small ingot?

What world? I don't know. I searched and find this website before commenting: http://www.luckyironfish.com/shop , which says It costs $25 each, while you can find $22 iron pan on Amazon. Sure it might be cheaper in Cambodia, then the price of iron pans would be lower as well. They didn't just use an ingot, they shaped the ingot into a lucky fish, which also costs money.

Who wants to put an ingot in their food? But a lucky fish? We could all use some luck.

And the good thing about a fish rather than a pan is you can put it in your soup pan, your wok, your fry-pan, etc. Try putting your cast-iron pan into your wok!

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#179

Post by sandaru1 »

4684499 wrote: post #174
kirrent wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally in the linked Wikipedia article: "Although cast-iron cookware is known to transmit iron to food during cooking, the cost to obtain it is prohibitive for most of the individuals living in poverty in rural Cambodia, who earn less than $1 per day." In what world would a cast iron pan be cheaper than a small ingot?

What world? I don't know. I searched and find this website before commenting: http://www.luckyironfish.com/shop , which says It costs $25 each, while you can find $22 iron pan on Amazon. Sure it might be cheaper in Cambodia, then the price of iron pans would be lower as well. They didn't just use an ingot, they shaped the ingot into a lucky fish, which also costs money.

It's $25 because it's buy one - give one free. http://www.luckyironfish.com/facts (At the bottom).

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#180

Post by Laforet »

Banthum wrote: post #82
gurkendoktor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard plenty of anecdotes from this decade that toddlers in rural China commonly poop onto the street, and that public toilets on e.g. buses are too messy to be hygienic. It seems to be common enough: https://www.quora.com/Chinese-Etiquette-and-Behavior-Is-poop... Better than doing it in one's own drinking water, but I think what saves the Chinese is not education, but a tradition of cooking absolutely everythin…

It's far beyond "toddlers in rural China commonly poop in the street". In downtown Shanghai I got to watch a mother walk out of her business holding her child, have the child crap on the sidewalk (while being held in the mothers' arms), and then brought back inside. This was not a baby. The kid looked about 3-4 years old. This goes on in subway stations as well. The parent has the kid sit on the edge of a garbage can…

This arises from a mixture of two things:

A strong agrarian tradition where no piece of human waste is going to be left festering in the sun - somebody is going to pick it up and make good use of it. In all seriousness this has been the case until chemical fertilisers became cheap enough, before then every town had organised dung-gatherer guilds who organised daily cleanup of faeces in the street and sold the product to the farmers in rural areas. Even urine-soaked earth dug up in alleys can be sold as a source of nitrates.

A second and more ingrained reason is that young children are regarded to only have the intelligence of animals because you cannot reason with them like how pre-Christianity Romans thought, thus they are to be treated with the same level of respect that animals deserve: if kids want to relieve themselves, then it might as well happen on the spot because self-control is beyond their facilities.

Shanghai is also unusual among major Chinese cities that many households in the old town are not serviced by sewage lines. Instead everybody bought their nightly waste to public septic tanks and pour it down a chute before a vacumm truck takes the load away every few weeks. Thus the residents are typically less fazed at the sight of faecal matter than their compatriots.

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