Human Excreta: Hazardous Waste or Valuable Resource? Shifting Views of Modernity

In the late nineteenth century, a water-carried system of flush toilets and sewage pipes came to be regarded as 'modern' and 'Western' and became part of the package of transformations conceived as 'development, ' which international organizations endorsed after 1945. However, in promoting sanitation, the World Health Organization and other organizations faced contradictory demands: protecting populations from fecalborne diseases, providing affordable and culturally acceptable forms of excrement disposal, maintaining valuable fertilizer for agricultural use, and establishing sustainable structures and methods were difficult to reconcile. Over time, as officers from different organizations grappled with question of advantages and disadvantages of solutions for different regions, it became increasingly doubtful whether the flush toilet/water-carried disposal could be the model for the entire world, and whether it even should. Gradually, as scientific information and public attitudes changed, international recommendations shifted from viewing excreta reuse as a temporarily necessary evil to--partially--embracing it as an ecologically desirable long-term development goal. The importance of modernity as a principal driver of sanitation reform remained intact, but the concept of what constituted modernity changed from one whose main criteria was efficient hazard removal to one geared toward comprehensive health protection and resource conservation. Over several decades, international organizations acted as catalysts for the conceptual developments regarding human waste disposal and the ideological underpinnings they stood for. Keywords: human waste, excreta, sanitation, night soil, WHO, World Bank, modernization.
One could make a case that the disposal of human excrement has been at the center of key steps of human development. The embrace of agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle [...]