Good use of plastic. Kudos!!

A Swedish entrepreneur is planning to mass produce Peepoo, a biodegradable plastic bag that acts as a single-use toilet, which may help millions of urban slum dwellers in developing countries like India

The bag, which is currently undergoing field trials in India and Kenya, is the brainchild of Anders Wilhelmson, an architect and professor in Stockholm. Once used, the bag can be knotted and buried, and a layer of urea crystals breaks down the waste into fertiliser, killing off disease-producing pathogens found in feces.

"Not only is it sanitary, they can reuse this to grow crops," Wilhelmson was quoted as saying by The New York Times. According to Wilhelmson, he has drawn inspiration to design the biodegradable toilet from Kenyan slum dwellers, who collect their excrement in a plastic bag and dispose of it by flinging it, calling it a "flyaway toilet" or a "helicopter toilet".

"People will say, it's valuable to me, but well priced," said the Swedish entrepreneur who has patented the bag and is confident that the bag will turn a profit. He plans to sell the bag for about 2 or 3 cents -- comparable to the cost of an ordinary plastic bag. According to United Nations figures, an estimated 2.6 billion people in the developing world, or about 40 percent of the earth's population, do not have access to a toilet.

It also estimated that 1.5 million children worldwide die from diarrhea every year due to of poor sanitation and hygiene, which is largely because of open defecation of waste that contaminates drinking water.            

One of the UN Millennium Development Goals, set in 2000, is to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to drinking water and sanitation, but so far progress has been minimal. With that in mind, Swedish Peepoople created the Peepoo bag to serve as a personal, portable and low-cost latrine for all the many people who don’t have one. Designed for use sitting, squatting or standing, the single-use, biodegradable plastic bag measures 14 by 38 cm and is lined with a urea-coated gauze layer that disinfects all waste. Used bags are odour-free for at least 24 hours and are safe for burial underground. Within two to four weeks after use, however, their contents get converted to high-quality fertiliser—something that’s also rare in many areas and so could become a source of income and further enrichment for an individual or village. Following field tests last year in Kenya and India, the Peepoo bag is scheduled to begin production this summer.

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