The Big Necessity

by Rose George

On the walls hang densely detailed displays relating to sanitary history. Visitors who trek out to the airport area—they are more numerous, since the museum was included in the Lonely Planet Guide to India a couple of years ago—will get an education. They can learn that the best and first flush toilets were built five millennia ago in the Indus Valley cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, and that Ben Affleck once bought Jennifer Lopez a jewel-encrusted toilet seat (though she’s now moved on to the TOTO Neorest). They can be enlightened by one poster that elucidates the Su-jok therapy devised by Korean scientist Park Jae Woo, which I will include here in a spirit of public health because it served me well during ensuing months of research in toilet-deficient places. Should the urge to defecate strike, take a pen, pencil, or blunt object and trace a line, deeply and with pressure, in a clockwise direction on the left palm or counterclockwise on the right. The urge, assures Dr. Park, “will immediately cease. You too can try sometime and feel the magic pressure in reverse order will give good relief in constipation.”

  A visitors’ book collects comments, some with expected humor, some serious. Jack Sim of the WTO has left his compliments. Nana Ziesche thought it “such a big history part never taught in school. What a pity.” Swiss tourist Jonathan Hecker offered his congratulations because “this is exactly what we need to pull sanitation out of its dirty corner.”

  Pathak intends to keep pulling. He has plans for a University of Sanitation. He will also amend the nonprofit model and accept grants. There is still much work to do and Sulabh needs help to do it. Despite the organization’s achievements, half a million Indians are still cleaning dry latrines. “Seen in that context,” Pathak tells me, “Sulabh has achieved almost nothing.” A Sulabh colleague is also gloomy. “Sanitation is a gigantic problem,” he says. “The world needs a thousand Sulabhs, a hundred Dr. Pathaks. What Sulabh does is a drop in the ocean.”

  Pathak prefers to see things more brightly. “We are still at the beginning of the beginnings,” he once said. “We are a candle in the dark.” And the dark doesn’t frighten him. This is the man who transformed teenage rebellion into a toilet revolution, and overturned profoundly held beliefs about purity and pollution in the process. “It’s totally amazing,” he tells me by way of a farewell. “Scavengers used to be afraid of our shadows. But look. The earth and sky can meet.”

  _________________

  Da Li, China

  (Author)

  CHINA’S BIOGAS BOOM

  A PIG IN EVERY BEDROOM

  ____________

  A several-thousand-mile road trip across China can provoke a lot of questions. For example, how tiny dots on the map turn out to be cities you’ve never heard of but have six million people and more skyscrapers than London. Or why Red, our Chinese translator, thought that asking melon sellers for directions was always the best option when lost. Or why we were almost killed by truck drivers several times a day, occasions that provoked comments from our driver, a chubby, lovely man called Wang, like, “That truck’s from Inner Mongolia. He thinks he’s still driving on grassland.”

  Mr. Wang had found my interest in fen, the Mandarin word for excrement, peculiar. Nonetheless, he tried to be helpful. He would point out when he spotted a truck full of fen looming behind, though its odor preceded it by far. He would alert me when he saw a tiny figure in a roadside field bearing a tank and a hose, spraying—by the smell of it—the contents of his toilets on his cabbages. This practice would horrify any public health professional, given the disease-load of feces, but it’s what happens to 90 percent of China’s excrement, and has been done forever. There are reasons not to eat salads in China, and why the sizzling woks are so sizzling.

  Of all the peoples of the world, the Chinese are probably the most at home with their excrement. They know its value. Those roadside fenspreaders are only the latest practitioners of a 4,000-year tradition of using human excreta to fertilize fields. China’s use of night soil, as they rightly call a manure that is picked up at night, is probably the reason that its fields and paddies are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations—the Maya’s, for one—floundered when their soils turned to dust.

  Sanitation professionals sometimes divide the world into fecalphobic and fecal-philiac cultures. India is the former (though only when the dung is not from cows); China is definitely and blithely the latter. Nor is the place of excrement confined to the fields. Fen and toilets have featured prominently in Chinese public life and literature for at least a thousand years. In Beijing, I found several shelves of books—under the heading “Toilet Culture”—at a state bookstore. One tells the tale of Qi Furen, concubine of the first Han emperor, whose fate was to have her eyes burned out, her limbs cut off, and her ears sliced off by her mother-in-law, who then threw her into the toilet to die. The dowager empress called the poor concubine “the Human Pig,” a name most records attribute to the total abasement of Qi Furen, but which I suspect had more to do with the fact that up till today, pigsties and toilets in China are often the same thing. According to some authors, the Chinese word for toilet, ce, originally meant pigsty. One of China’s toilet goddesses—there are several—was originally a beautiful lady called Zhi Yan who saved a boy who was drowning in a toilet. The boy survived; Zhi Yan was drowned and made a toilet goddess by the King of Heaven. For reasons that remain obscure to both me and Red, even after reading the riches provided by the Toilet Culture shelf, the “toilet deity is therefore a pig or a beautiful woman.”

  In the Communist era, excrement took on political importance. Andrew Morris, a historian at California Polytechnic, relates the story of Chen Qiaozhu, a famous night-soil collector from Shanghai who eventually managed to leave her sanitary profession, or—in her patriotic description—“came out of the toilet to declare victory.” (She also became a competitive cyclist.) In 1959, the night-soil carrier Shi Chuanxiang was a star speaker at the Communist Party’s National Conference of Heroes. He vividly described working for the exploitative gangs who controlled Beijing’s night-soil collection, and of customers who showed their appreciation for his work by calling him “Mr. Shitman” or “Stinky Shit Egg.”

  Shi qualified as a hero because Party policy had decided that excrement was essential for the Great Agricultural Leap Forward. States competed to collect the most valuable fertilizer. Hunan province launched the “Seas of Shit, Mountains of Fertilizer” campaign, exhorting all Hunanese to collect as much human night soil as possible (they obliged with 10 million tons’ worth). In Hubei, “ten thousand people entered battle like flying horses to collect manure and march forward side by side.”

  Flying horses have now evolved into cars, but the Communist Party’s efforts to dictate the toilet habits of its people are unchanged in their fervor. Since the 1930s, China’s authorities have thrown much energy into biogas. Along with all the other stunning statistics China can provide, it can also claim to be the world leader in making energy from human excrement.

  Biogas can be produced from the fermentation of any organic material, from wood to vegetables to human excreta. In an oxygen-free digester, which acts somewhat like a human stomach, microorganisms break down the material into sugar and acids, which then become gas. Mostly methane, with carbon dioxide and a little hydrogen sulfide, biogas can be used as fuel for cooking hobs, lights, and, sometimes, showers. It can also be converted into electricity. The slurry that remains from the digestion process is good fertilizer, and considerably safer than raw excrement.

  At last count, if official figures are reliable, 15.4 million rural households in China are connecting their toilets to a biogas digester, switching on their stoves a few hours later, and cooking with the proceeds. Worldwide, Nepal has more digesters per capita than China. India, meanwhile, has installed several million, though they run on cow dung, and there are only so many cows. China has a billion humans, and that means a billion suppliers of a cheap and inexhaustible supply of clean energy.

  The scientific epicent
er of China’s biogas program is the Institute of Biogas, or BIOMA, a complex near the American consulate in the city of Chengdu, in China’s Sichuan Province. The city is known for its panda research institute, one of whose residents is a sponsored panda called Microsoft, and is situated on a plain known as Tianfuzhi guo, usually translated as “The Land of Abundance.” The lands around Chengdu are China’s breadbasket. Here, farmers can get rich by the power of the soil. The capital of the farming lands is a spacious, pleasant city that contrasts with the smoggy, sweltering soup of Chongqing, a grim city of 10 million people which I had flown into.

  Mr. Fang, a neat and pleasant man, is the deputy director of China’s biogas program, though he’s only been in the post for two months. Before biogas, he worked on agricultural mechanics at a rice research institute. He knows more about tractors than digesters. Perhaps for backup, he has gathered a welcoming committee of half a dozen scientists, including a fierce woman who is clearly there on Party business. Mr. Fang has prepared a PowerPoint introduction to his institute’s work. Onscreen, China’s biogas program is going full steam ahead. Between 2001 and 2004, Guangxi Province installed 250,000 digesters per year in rural households, the most of any province. Biogas is most popular in the southern provinces of China, where the climate is warmer (biogas digesters work better in temperatures above 50 degrees F). To combat northern temperatures, though, two digester systems have been developed. The pig-toilet-vegetable system links a pigsty and toilet to the fields, whereas the four-in-one model adds the element of a greenhouse, under which the digester is installed. The four-in-one was developed in Liaoning Province, where winter temperatures reach–22 degrees F, and where a digester without a greenhouse to shelter it would only work for five months a year.

  The Institute of Biogas was set up in 1981 with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The building dates from then, and from a tour of the laboratories below—which house dull jars of brown test material in spartan labs and rickety-looking equipment—it shows its age. Nonetheless, according to Mr. Fang, BIOMA is the only such research center in China and famous internationally. The institute has already assisted Romania, Guinea-Bissau, and Rwanda in setting up biogas projects. (I forget to ask whether it was involved in Rwanda’s extraordinary biogas project, whereby half of the country’s prisons generate gas and electricity from the excreta of genocidal murderers.)

  The BIOMA building, says Mr. Fang with some pride, also houses the editorial headquarters of China Biogas journal, and has completed more than two hundred research projects for the Chinese government. I should not be fooled by the age of the equipment (though Mr. Fang also asks me to put in a good word with UNDP about more funding). Serious work is done here. Professor Zhang, one of the scientists present, is working on “increasing gas yield by improving officially sanctioned pig diet.” Dr. Hu is interested in microbiology and the fermentation process. Elsewhere, some of the institute’s staff of eighty-seven are attempting to reduce the risk of bird flu transmission. (This is a real risk, since digesters require the close proximity of animal and human.)

  Despite the complexity of the research, the scientists insist that the system is simple. “The farmer doesn’t have to do anything,” says Dr. Hu. There is no stirring, no caretaking. “All he has to do is ensure there’s input and use the output.” To translate: all he has to do is use the toilet, and then the gas. If I want further proof, they suggest I go to see it in action, in the nearby village of Mian Zhu.

  If towns with six-lane highways running through them are villages, then Mian Zhu is a village. We are directed to stop by the side of the road and wait for an escort, which is revealed to be two officials from the Rural Energy Office. I stupidly never took their names, so I will refer to them as White Shirt and Red Shirt, with apologies for disrespect. They take us through a field by the roadside to a compound of three houses, each with huge wooden gates on which colorful warriors and symbols have been painted. On the other side of the warriors, a trail of blood leads to—or from—the pigsty. Mrs. Tien, whose house this is, says they’ve just killed a pig. They’re now a six-pig family when ten minutes ago they were seven. She is smiling and excited. “She’s saying, ‘They’ve come to see our biogas digester!’” says Red, though of course there is nothing to see but a concrete circle in the ground. Digesters have to be sealed to work.

  In Mrs. Tien’s kitchen, I am given what will be the first of many biogas demonstrations. They generally proceed like this: switch on the biogas. Sniff. Express pleasure that it smells only faintly sulphuric. Light the gas. Express more pleasure. Switch on the light. Take a picture (which never comes out well because the light isn’t that strong). Mrs. Tien seems genuinely excited to demonstrate her free gas, though I get the sense she’s done it before. Red Shirt says that Mian Zhu is the centerpiece of the Ecological Homeland program, and 60 percent of houses in this area have digesters, making a total of 10,000 households. People like biogas, says White Shirt, and anyway it has an illustrious history. “In 1957 Chairman Mao went to Hubei province and saw a biogas digester and said, ‘This must be well-promoted.’” And it was so.

  Sitting on an expensive sofa next to a huge TV screen in Mrs. Tien’s living room, I ask the officials if biogas has any disadvantages. They say there are none. Any problems can be dealt with by the technicians of the Biogas Management Unit, whose telephone number, since I ask, is 65980212. “Each town has one to three teams of workmen, so they usually come within a day.” By 2010, they expect everyone in this province to have installed a digester. If there are malfunctions, the network of rural energy technicians can fix them swiftly. It all sounds too good to be true. But, as an Indian biogas expert tells me, China can do this, because China can impose from on high. “India is a democracy,” the expert says. “We have to ask, to plead, to persuade. It takes longer. It is harder. China can do things faster.” Also, China can pay. Households that buy a digester get a 1,200 yuan ($175) grant toward the total cost (usually about 3,000 yuan). It all sounds perfect. Even so, I am not persuaded by the Potemkin village of Mian Zhu.

  To reach the regional headquarters of the Chinese Women’s Federation, which are located in the pleasant city of Xi’an, one must first walk the length of a street of shops and barbers. The barber shops have barbering equipment and the added odd extra of overly made-up women smiling insistently at my companion, a Caucasian man. At his approach, doors open and garish faces pop out before they see me and the smile disappears. After that gauntlet, I arrive at the Women’s Federation in a sour mood, but it doesn’t last, because my appointment is with Wang Ming Ying, founder and president of the Shaanxi Mothers’ Environmental Protection Volunteer Association. Wang’s energy can soothe the foulest tempers, even mine.

  Her office is not much bigger than a cubicle, with a bed for the times she regularly works too late to get home. Wang is also small, but her spirit is disproportionate to her stature. She radiates warmth, even in translation, and she will not hear of starting a conversation without first providing platefuls of huge peaches and gigantic watermelons. “You have to eat melons to help the farmers,” she says. “This year there are too many melons. Eat! Eat!”

  I’d read about the Shaanxi Mothers a few months earlier, when they received a sizable international prize from a sustainable energy foundation. The group won for installing biogas digesters using human excrement in provincial areas of Shaanxi, where rural life is generally hard and the winters cold, and where any extra energy source makes sense.

  In theory, biogas has all sorts of advantages and no disadvantages. It saves on artificial fertilizer use because the slurry is filled with nutrients. Scientists from China’s Research Institute of Medical Military Scientists decided biogas slurry increased vegetable yields by 50 to 60 percent. One person’s urine and feces can fertilize 885 square feet of land, according to another calculation. Because biogas can be used for cooking and lighting, it saves on conventional energy consumption of liquid petroleum gas (LPG) or coal (on
e cubic meter of biogas is the equivalent of six hours’ worth of a 60–100 watt bulb). It saves forests, because wood is the commonest fuel source in rural China. A 1991 survey found that a five-person family in Guangxi used 2.3 tons of wood for fuel per year. And it saves on labor: on average, a rural Chinese woman preparing food on an iron stove fed with rice stalks or wood takes two hours to cook a meal. A meal cooked using biogas can be ready in twenty minutes. Fast food.

  Biogas has a long history, though the length of the history and its exact birthplace are debated. The Babylonians are credited with noticing that gas coming from sewage could be useful, as are the Assyrians. Marco Polo reportedly saw covered tanks of sewage—simple anaerobic digesters—in China. And Count Alessandro Volta, as well as inventing the electric battery and giving his name to voltage, concluded in 1776 that there was a correlation between decaying organic substances and the amount of gas they gave off.

  The Chinese say that they have been using biogas for as long as they’ve been spreading fen on their fields. In biogas circles, the credit for pioneering the first noteworthy biogas digester is given to a leper colony in Bombay, which set up a digester using gobar (cow manure) in 1859 and gave Indian lepers the new concept of gobargas.

  A discussion at the Institute of Biogas had produced the consensus that Chinese biogas owes its existence to a man called Luo Guo Ri, who developed a biogas digester in the 1930s and installed it in several locations around Shanghai. But both Luo Guo Ri and his plans were swallowed up by the Japanese when Japan invaded China in 1937. The plants were destroyed and that, for several decades, was that. In 1972, though, an oil crisis caused certain careful scientists to revisit Luo’s work. China had energy needs but, in the words of Mr. Fang, “Our door was closed. We could not ask for support from outside. We had to find other energy sources.” If oil was expensive, then why not tap a resource produced, for free, by—according to population figures back then—850 million bowels? It made political, economic, and agricultural sense. A campaign was launched with the slogan “Biogas for every household.” For the next five years, up to two million digesters were installed each year, in rural households that had toilets and enough pigs. To function efficiently and productively, animal manure is required to boost the volume of excreta. A cow’s dung can produce 500 liters of gas a year, while a human only produces 30. There aren’t many cows in China, but there are pigs. China’s energy problems would be alleviated by a partnership between pigs and humans.