China Environmental Law

Improving the life of China’s huge rural population has been a high priority at least during the tenure of President Hu Jintao.  Although a more prosperous countryside will put additional demands on the environment as richer peasants demand more and more things, progress can lead to environmental gains in other areas.  Rationalizing water, fertilizer, and pesticide use in the country side would be especially beneficial.  In this regard, one area where significant progress can be made is in the area of human waste disposal/reuse.  And that brings us to today’s story.

For a Chinese farmer like Gao Zhiping living in a backward, mountainous region, all talk of toilets is like talking about sex — it’s private, and it’s rude. To his way of seeing, going to the toilet is part of life, but not nearly as important as the happiness of a good corn harvest or the benefits from subsidy policy.

In Gao’s village and the larger Shanxi Province, open toilets are common. Farmers build a simple toilet by using flagstones, and most of the latrine pits are as high [sic?] as two meters.

These toilets are aesthetically unpleasant for any number of reasons, but they pose significant health and safety hazards as well:

In some places, the villagers don’t have a personal toilet in their house. Instead, they share an open toilet. But such a large toilet is dangerous for children, as some have slipped into the pit below and drowned in excrement, recalls 53-year-old Gao.

More alarming [what can be "more alarming" than being dispatched via latrine?] is the health threat imposed by this type of open toilet. In the past when tap water was not available, Gao had to go far to carry water from the Sishui River at the foot of the mountain. But the underground water was polluted by the open toilets, which further leaked into the river. “We were worried, but no one knew how to deal with the situation.”

Help arrived as early as 1996 when “UNICEF kicked off a pilot program aiming at the rural areas of northwest China . . . with a focus on building a new type of double-urn latrines.” 

UNICEF’s program was gradually absorbed into the policy-making process at the top level of China’s government.  In 2007, a decision was made to improve sanitation in rural areas by supporting a switch to five new types of toilets: double-urn, three-chamber, bio-gas, urine-diversion and water flushed.  Currently, the new toilets have been installed in 16% of the rural areas of Shanxi Province; the goal is to achieve 65% coverage by 2015.

To reach this goal, the central government continues to increase the funds devoted to the toilet upgrades.  107 million yuan was allocated in 2004, and the amount had risen to 300 million yuan in 2008.  It’s still not enough, however.  It costs nearly 1,000 yuan to renovate a toilet [one third of the annual earnings of Mr. Gao's family of four], but the central government only pays 350 yuan per toilet.  The provincial and local governments are supposed to contribute to the cost as well, but “most of the local governments of Shanxi are short of revenue.” 

Some of these new toilet designs are truly remarkable.  Here’s the description of the “double-urn” toilet:

The science behind this type of toilet is quite simple, but it is effective, says Lei. The first urn, filled with water, is used for storing dung. Within three months’, bacteria carried by dung are nearly all killed in an anaerobic environment, and the dung will be automatically transferred to the second urn through a tunnel linking the two as a result of the difference of pressures. Then, the dung in the second urn continues the process of ferment before eventually being disposed of.

You can read more about the urine-diversion toilets (which seem similar to the double-urn model) and their use in China in this recent New York Times piece.

It’s hard to imagine a better investment for rural China than these toilets.  They seem to address so many problems facing China’s peasants and the rural environment.

“Wang Xianzhong, one of the pilot program’s beneficiaries, is happy to see that he is no longer bothered by flies, as the new toilet no longer smells foul.” Presumably the children of village are breathing a little easier as well, since they face one less mortal hazard as they go about their business of the day.