 I've been doing it since the day I was born and so have you. I know for a fact because otherwise you'd be dead and yet above the age of 13 we're supposed to pretend like it's not organizing our life even though it pretty much is. You guessed it, I'm talking about poop. Let's talk crap. I believe that the right to public toilets is the same as the right to education or the right to healthcare. Due to our urbanized life it's a bit weird thing to think about poop and our excrement and so on because we lost the connection to nature. With the water flush toilets all our waste, whether it's poop, it goes out of sight, out of mind. You know, how far is your toilet from your kitchen? It's very difficult to make people understand that it's not what you actually see or what you can actually smell is the problem but there are more dangerous things in the background. Welcome to Standard Time, a Eurazine production. This is a talk show with guests from all over Europe where we talk loads of crap. I'm Reka Kingapop, editor-in-chief of Eurazine, the magazine presenting this show. Standard Time is a display your production. This is a new platform showcasing European content in 15 different languages. I'm also practicing stand-up comedian and if there's anything I've learned from years of stage experience it is that the only type of poop jokes you should never crack are the corny ones. And today we're taking a closer look at our own shit as it floats all around Europe. Humans just can't deal with their crap. This universal experience of excretion has been with us for hundreds of millions of years ever since we said goodbye to sponges and jellyfish and started to evolve an elementary canal or a through-gut. It's quite a nice invention, I would say. For instance, it allows us to reserve our mouths for feeding or talking and other fun stuff because we have a whole other mechanism to get rid of waste. Pretty neat, right? And yet, we don't seem to want to talk about it all that much even though sewer management is the single most important hygienic function of human settlements. We can get along pretty well without electricity. It wouldn't be a pleasant experience, but we could survive without running water in every household as long as drinking water is available in the general vicinity. I'll wager that we can even tolerate a scarcity of libraries for a while but without the proper disposal of sewage, we'd die of cholera and other horrific diseases in no time. In most European cultures, poop is taboo and most of us are socialized to run away from that conversation but some are attempting to break that taboo. It's all the more important because it has deep racial, gendered and class implications. Of course it does. In urban areas, the access to public toilets is often severely restricted and the right to basic hygiene weighs down all the more on the poor and especially on unhoused people. Tessa Udvarhei, one of our guests for today, writes about how governments want to create the ideal of a clean city for tourists, resulting in poor racialized minorities being pushed to the margins of it. This form of urban segregation is mainly informed by the dogma of cleanliness rooted in the 18th century. It's a particularly evil strategy, making it impossible for the poor to attain personal hygiene and then being angrily at them for it. It's not only evil, it's also very stupid. While grassroots initiatives and state-level strategies aim at increasing the quality of sanitation, there are still a lot of challenges to tackle. According to the WHO in the European region, more than 36 million people lack access to basic sanitation services and the access we do have is really unequal. Ever since France's decision to dismantle the so-called Calais jungle camps in 2016, human rights experts have been urging the country to provide asylum seekers living there with safe water and sanitation. In addition to this form of discrimination, the release of untreated urban wastewater poses a real threat to the environment and also subjects local communities to severe pollution. As it stands today, Europe's two opposite shores are both soaked in poop and neither the British nor Turkey's governments seem to be doing a good job cleaning up after themselves. The picturesque Sea of Marmara has been suffocating under Istanbul's untreated and under-treated sewage since the 1980s. In his European press-prize-nominated article for Eurozine, Un-Ode to Marmara, one of my favorite authors, Kaya Gench, tracked the ensuing feta plankton outbreaks colloquially called the sea snot crisis, which has led to fish species populations dropping from 127 different species in 1915 to 20 only in 2010. But it's not just this marvelous inland sea that's drowning in poop. Following Brexit, the UK has been accused of not upholding EU standards to protect marine and human health by dumping sewage straight into the English Channel and the North Sea. And it's not like they couldn't know better. During the great stink of 1858, the summer heat did a number on the River Thames, which was inundated with human and industrial waste, which rendered the city unsafe and, well, incredibly stinky. London had endured a number of cholera outbreaks by then and tens of thousands had died, but Parliament didn't act until the spell became unbearable for them as well. By the time it was so unbearable that it prompted arguably the most glorious infrastructure project of the century, the London Sewage System, designed by none other than Joseph Baselget, my personal hero. It was such a marvel that Baselget was invited over to repeat this victorious feat in other European capitals, among them here in Budapest, where we record this episode. Now, these sewers did an amazing job in the past 150 years, partially because Baselget planned for double the capacity than was needed at the time. That's some great engineering there. In the meantime, however, London has grown from 2 million inhabitants to 9 million in its metropolitan area, and the Victorian times sewers are royally overwhelmed. The privatization of water services has not helped this issue either. In 2022, raw sewage was released into English rivers and seas for up to 1.75 million hours. That's like 200 years. On average, there are 825 spills into waterways per day in the UK. Comedian Joe Lysett recently pulled quite the stunt on Channel 4 by faking a leak at the Royal Albert Dock in Liverpool to draw attention to the UK sewage system and advocating that water companies stop paying dividends and invest in their infrastructure instead. Clean water and sanitation are the sixth sustainable developmental goal the EU is addressing, but there are major differences between member states in how they handle their s***. However, draining sewage is only one half of the problem. Trading wastewater is wholly another and a gigantic task at debt. Of course, the water that goes down the drains contains a lot of contaminants and toxins, but it could also be a resource. New technologies are attempting to address this problem sometimes by rethinking very old methodologies, such as plant filtering and composting regimes. Though composting and using urban waste as fertilizer is proposed as one sustainable solution, there is a reluctance to use it due to the toxic material and chemicals found in it, but as Kate Brown puts it, if people realize that what they flushed down the toilet comes back to them on their dinner plates, they might be more thoughtful both about what they consume and toss down the drains. Arguably, poop contains multitudes. Pathogens and nutrients, human rights issues and industrial challenges and so much more, our guests are here to talk s*** with me today. Eva Tessoudwadhe is an anthropologist and an environmental psychologist. She's the co-founder of the School of Public Life, a grassroots civic education initiative dedicated to building a democratic and just-hungry. Well, good luck with that. She is also the co-founder of a grassroots housing advocacy group called The City Is For All, which has been mobilizing homeless people and their allies for housing rights and campaigning for access to public toilets. Ottiladjörn Bodnar is an architect, entrepreneur and executive vice president of Organica Water, a company that offers cost- and space-efficient, botanical garden-like solutions for wastewater treatment. Its mission is to show the world that wastewater treatment can be safe and aesthetically pleasing as well, while also making the world a more sustainable place. Vince Bokosz is a biochemical engineer and an assistant professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He specializes in wastewater management and environmental biotechnology. Let's talk crap and let's start with the human rights angle of this gigantic issue. You had been campaigning for public toilets in Budapest for quite a while. So how do you make the space for a topic like this in a discourse that really tries to avoid it? Your question assumes that the right to public toilets or the right to poop is an issue for poor people. And I think one of the main things that I have been trying to do or we have been trying to do with the groups that I've been fighting with is to make sure that people understand that everybody needs to go to the toilet. It's a real human rights issue because it's a human need that we need to satisfy. The lack of public toilets or the lack of public infrastructure for going to the toilet affects a lot of times those people who are either poor and they don't have a place to go, a private space to go or who are sick because they have some kind of disease or in some kind of condition for example pregnant. The most difficult part of this is the stigma, the cultural stigma that we don't like to talk about dirty things and we don't like to talk about things that relate to the body. As a parent of a child who at some point wasn't abandoning their diapers it was a really crucial point. Like I can grab a small child and like rush into the next pub and just say we're going to pay afterwards. This is the kind of problem that you buy your way out of. This is not some kind of a God-given or like natural thing to have to pay for these things beyond the taxes you pay. So your suggestion to this problem would be public infrastructure, right? I believe that the right to public toilets is the same as the right to education or the right to healthcare. I think the most important thing is that there are public toilets that are accessible, wheelchair accessible and accessible to all kinds of disabilities that are free, that are clean. So just because something is free it doesn't mean that it has to be low quality. So to me the best public toilets are the cleanest public toilets because this is what everybody needs. Nobody would like to go into a dirty toilet. The best public toilets are equipped with staff who actually supervise how people use the toilet because I think one of the other kind of arguments that people raise when arguing against public toilets is that, oh, people go in and do weird things like prostitution or using drugs or things like this and I agree that public toilets shouldn't be used for those kinds of things. Public toilets should be used for peeing and pooping. Exchanging tampons as well? Yes, and exchanging diapers and things like this. You know, it has to serve this basic purpose. One pro tip for those travelling or walking about cities and really needing to go and not being able to afford it, universities, it's glorious. First of all you have to have the confidence to just march into a building and pretend like you belong there and just go. I don't necessarily advocate for people to do this. Right here where you teach, Winza, you are researching and engineering at the other end of this infrastructure problem and that is wastewater management. There are two ends of the pipe but I have to focus on the input end as well. Also with students, sometimes I run a quiz just to have an idea what information they have about sanitation, about the price and the value of water. Sometimes the results are striking, they are very interested but sometimes they, for example, they don't know what price they pay or their parents pay for one litre of drinking water compared to the bottled water in the shop which can be 100, 700 or 1000 times more expensive than the tap water. Due to our urbanised life, it's a bit weird thing to think about poop and our excrement and so on because at least partially we lost the connection to nature. Babies, they are very happy with their poop. There is no problem and once we have learned to behave, it becomes disgusting. I mean thank God because those games they play sometimes are not very standard. People and especially young people are pretty responsive and open for initiatives towards sustainability, environmental protection, water value and those topics. There are good examples for plastic waste or solid waste. There's a big program in Hungary to collect the solid waste from Tissa River. They fabricate boats out of the plastic bottles. They can collect tons of waste. I'm not going to say that let's build castles out of fecal sludge but for instance to go to visit a wastewater treatment plant or a drinking water production plant, that could be a great program and we can see the results, the clean treated wastewater or the clean drinking water in the developed countries. And now a word from today's host, Közbenstudio in Budapest. It is a community workshop, office and art space established in 2019. Since then it has hosted numerous exhibitions, concerts and workshops and over the years has evolved into an unconventional co-working space. Currently there are two leather ornament designers, a jeweler, an architect, a photographer, an animator two graphic artists, a web designer and even a web developer working here and sometimes even I crash at the desk here. You can also become a supporter of the show and you don't even have to get me jewelry. I mean you can of course if you want to but it may be a bit more straightforward if you pledge your support at patreon.com. That is Eurazine, the magazine presenting this program. You can pledge as little as five euros a month or whatever you can afford and I promise I won't buy leather clutches or earrings from it. Instead you'll get access to bonus materials, invitations to the taping of the show and you even get to submit topics and questions. Now back to the program, let's talk a bit more crap. So let's talk about the procedures, alternative procedures to treat this kind of waste because Attila you have been working on technologies specifically to treat wastewater in a less industrialized setting, well it's still industrial but different technologies so basically green technologies, can you tell us about this? With urbanization we get disconnected from nature and with the water flush toilets all our waste whether it's poop it goes out of sight, out of mind. That approach really is very pervasive in the entire industrial society. Very soon 75% of humanity is going to live in cities so there is an underlying tendency globally to get disconnected from nature. What I also see is an emergence of what is called in various industries including the water treatment, wastewater treatment industry is the rise of nature-based technologies. We build these large industrial wastewater treatment plants outside the cities because while they're clean they still smell but it doesn't have to be outside the city just like the outhouse the outhouse was I assume a few dozen meters away from the kitchen but if I would ask around in this room you know how far is your toilet from your kitchen and the answer is invariably is going to be within three or five feet. The same thing can be done with wastewater management. Those systems that employ nature usually are based on much more complex ecologies and there are visible parts of it which are the plants and that has a massive psychological impact. So basically what we do, we indeed in the past 25 years we developed a nature-based solution but imagine a botanical garden that doesn't smell and can treat the sanitary wastewater, the wastewater that is produced in cities it's a huge issue in the developing world. There is a tremendous water shortage. Beijing is like 20, 25 million people so it's a large city and they're building a secondary water distribution system for recycled water. If I build my wastewater treatment plants 20, 30 kilometers outside the city and then I have to recycle the water, I pump it back into the city that requires a lot of energy and a lot of infrastructure. It also has a large carbon footprint. It is a very deep cultural issue, development of western civilization I think one of the main things was our relationship to body and also what we do with the things that come out of our bodies or go into our bodies. I think there is a big kind of contradiction in how we live in our cities today in Europe especially that people are really disgusted by dirt and especially dirt coming from human bodies or related to other people but they are also disgusted by the infrastructure that gets rid of this dirt and this is a very kind of basic cultural construct. So bathrooms in private spaces, they can be a form of a status symbol. You know, like how many bathrooms do you have in your house? That's a thing, like people when they move up the social ladder they believe that if they get two or even three bathrooms that's an amazing thing because then everybody has their own bathrooms. So it's very interesting that in public space we don't want to see it but we want it to be handled but we don't want to see the actual infrastructure that does something with it. I for example recently lived in China for a few years and I was really amazed how many properly maintained public toilets there are. It's like really highly civilized. I have to tell you there are a gazillion other things in wastewater that we don't even have any idea about. The emerging contaminants are chemicals that we start to realize that are in the water basically and that they are very harmful. We just start to wake up and realize, oh, you know, some of it actually remains in the treated wastewater, in the treated water, the forever chemicals. Two-thirds of the US population is exposed to unacceptable levels of forever chemicals. We have these emergent pollutants or let's say micro pollutants. They are harmful, I fully agree, they are harmful as you mentioned at very, very low concentrations. These are nanogram per litters. If you drop two sugar cubes in the Lake Balaton, that's that concentration. It can be also harmful for human health. Also nano and micro plastics are also undesired particles. I think this is important to mention now that you brought up the concept of cleanliness and of course this is what the discussion always revolves around is that it comes from an 18th century sanitation movement which is the result of industrializing countries, urbanizing populations because making a living is becoming less and less attainable in the countryside. But with this kind of urbanization arises an ever-recurring cycle of big infectious diseases and epidemics in the 1700s and going on as the sanitation movement grows into kind of an organizing idea. We can understand where this comes from but I think what is missing from this concept is an understanding that the contamination doesn't work the way people in the 1700s thought. The whole stigma around talking about human waste and dealing with human waste comes from, I think, a misunderstanding of what the problem is because the problem is more with the chemicals and not with the poop. But I also understand that it's very difficult to make people understand that it's not what you actually see is the problem or what you can actually smell is the problem but there are more dangerous things in the background. Homeless people come up a lot of times, especially in the cities, you know that they are the ones creating dirt and they are the ones why our streets are dirty. I think also there is this social stigma built around it which prevents us from actually solving the problem or talking about the real problems like let's get rid of homeless people, let's get rid of public toilets. Yes, but in the meantime you will die because there are so many bad chemicals everywhere and you are dealing with the wrong problem. What happens with human waste as it turns into a resource? How can this kind of waste be actually utilized? We consider waste water treatment plants as water resource recovery facilities. More and more we shift the technology that way and instead of removing pollutants, in the basins where the cleaning step is ongoing, there you have microorganisms. Let's say they digest, they eat the carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus sources coming from the inlet wastewater and it has no smell. You can have other problems at waste water treatment plants is the inlet and this mixed sludge goes to the so-called digester. It's an anaerobic process and we produce biogas that is the mixture of methane and carbon dioxide. We can produce heat energy and electric energy in cogeneration. We can also talk about compostation and also at farms there are technologies where we can go for just transforming this sludge to fertilizer. Thank you so much. Otila, can you give us some plastic examples of the technologies that you use? There are banana trees and all kinds of plants that are the visible part. We call them by the way water resource gardens, what we build. They are not wastewater treatment plants because we can produce fresh water. In order to see the water, clean water, as clean water as opposed to clean wastewater, you have to re-tag the water. One of the early water recycling projects was in California. What they did, they cleaned the wastewater as usual plus they added additional treatment steps which is reverse osmosis which makes it absolutely clean H2O. The engineers realized that this is H2O but it's still a problem because it's yucky. So that is the birth of the yuck factor in engineering. They took that absolutely clean water and they pumped it back underground and a little over there they pumped it out again. It was cleaned from the yuck factor and the reason is because it got re-associated with nature. The presence of nature in the treatment process is important. These water resource garden facilities in 18 countries, we always use locally available plants but the real trick is not the plants themselves but the roots dangle into the water, the big basin and there is a whole community living on the root system that actually eats the stuff out of the water. Hey there, let me just flag you up. Someone who has a personal favorite of mine, easily the favorite podcaster of mine in the whole wild world. She's a colleague and a partner, Claire Potter, a professor emeritus of history from the New School for Social Research in New York. She was the co-founder of Public Seminar, one of our partners in the URZ network and her sub-stack called Political Junkie and her podcast called Why Now Are Fantastic. So if you like these kinds of in-depth and entertaining conversations, you're going to love everything that Claire does. Subscribe to her sub-stack, listen to her podcast and just tell her that you love her because she deserves all good things in the world. Now back to the program. It's not because it gets closer to nature but because it gets more culturally acceptable. So I don't think there is a nature thing. I mean nature is also a social construct or a cultural construct and our relationship to it and I think it's really interesting how they have to re-brand water to be culturally acceptable, to fall into the category of clean. I think it's really interesting how human beings are fooling themselves all the time through culture. You know, my thing is public toilets. To make public toilets acceptable to people, culturally acceptable, is to turn them into community centers. There is this basic biological thing. You need to pee and poop. We have to do all these tricks for people to make it culturally and socially acceptable to people. School years, especially like elementary school, high school, that's a community hub. At least the ladies' rooms that I have experienced are always... That's where everybody was smoking. I had these experiences in Vienna as well as in Berlin. In Vienna, in the Musamos Quartier, public toilets, it's this gigantic, beautifully organized hub where there's like a whole little ecosystem of people coming and going and doing their business and doing their makeup before a job interview. And similarly in Berlin at the Hauptbahnhof and I arrived and everybody was like, you know, women commuting, doing their curls, exchanging shoes and all that. So there's this whole sort of support community of people getting ready for the battle of the day and I agree with you that the acceptance of toilets and how nice we make and how we do... That's a cultural thing. The relationship, you know, the re-tagging that we talked about, that is very psychological. We have seen and we experienced that water comes from nature, from the creek, from the well. You think it's clean, that's enough. It's not enough. If I put two glasses of water in front of you, in one we put a completely convincingly sanitized cockroach. Intellectually, you know that there is not a speck of living thing on that thing, okay? You take out the cockroach, okay? Which... are you going to drink that water? Of course not. Yes, that's... Yeah, I call that culture. Small children are so fascinated with poop, they're also fascinated with trash so trash is so exciting. Trash is the best. So what would be your suggestion to cultivate this kind of relationship, like a good understanding relationship? The first place, of course, that's family. So that's the community. And also we could think about as a community in the family what we can do to be more sustainable at home, in our household. But after it would be great to educate children and students at school, excursions, site visits, could show that those facilities can be attractive. It's very important to make stronger and smoother the communication between science and society and also science and policy. We are in a delay to implement, for example, sustainable development goals. So it's absolutely visible that we won't get there until 2030. And the main problem is the lack of political will. So we are in the coordinate system of GDP. We have other indicators, but we don't apply them. We calculate them, but the driving indicator is GDP. So without changing our economy, we won't get there. Knowledge about water and water science, that could be part of a more significant part of, I don't know, biologic courses or geographic courses in geographic courses at school. These climate change events, we can see that that's the case. We are in the 24th hour. And we should go to schools to give this information and not to frighten them, but to convince them that they could be those heroes. I totally agree with you that because of the current economic system, global economic system, which is inherently based on the requirement of growth and economic growth is extractionist and we have reached the limits of growth about 60 years ago and very little has happened since then. So it feels like a runaway train. I think what's important for the young generation is to, whether it's economy or water treatment or anything they do, it's very important to focus on the various tools that we will need in a new civilization because that's what is going to be needed. And I would also like to add that I think art has a very important role to play as art is recognizing where we are, vis-a-vis our relationship to the environment and this huge rude awakening that is going on now. Just adding a promising thing that we are around 8 billion on the globe. And I have a great colleague, Erno Dietrich, wrote books also about sustainability and I have heard it from him that if everyone, so these 8 billion people could take one small step towards sustainability then we could add those small steps and it's a huge distance. So we can take miles and thousands of miles towards the good direction. So just give me a hopeful closing word. How do we manufacture the very necessary political will? Yeah, I think the key word was political will. As you know, culture is really important and behavior change is important but it is actually, I think, a political question. And political will is only manufactured, I'm sorry to say, by people organizing. The politicians, the citizens of countries who have to organize for things like organized for public bathrooms or organized for better wastewater management or better sustainability policies and if we do things alone, it's very nice of us to do things on our own but it's not going to change things. We don't only have to organize but I think we have to change politicians and political power. So actually we have to run for office and then become the decision makers and then respond to the pressure from social movements as decision makers. So my hopeful note is that unfortunately it's up to us, nobody else will do it and it's up to us as a collective, not as individuals. I agree but you do that and I scream at you from the sidelines. Thank you everyone for joining today. This program is presented by Eurazine, an online magazine bringing you reads from more than 100 partner publications and across dozens of European languages. This talk show is a display Europe production. This play is a content sharing platform which offers you content on politics, culture, community and so much more and somehow miraculously also doesn't abuse your user data. I know, it's a shocker. That's where you also find this show with 15 language versions and subtitles. Now, if you want us to have more of these cute animations that we like to run or just like what you see and wish to support our work please go to patreon.com. That is Eurazine, the magazine presenting this show. You can pledge as little as 5 euros a month or whatever you can afford and I promise we won't buy booze on it. You'll get access to bonus materials, invitations to the taping of the show and even get to suggest topics and questions. This program is co-founded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union and the European Cultural Foundation. Importantly, views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and the speakers only and they do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them. I mean, I hope they watch this and maybe take our advice or something.