 from the American Creativity Association on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Phyllis Bleece, and today on the show, we will be discussing the topic of a new book called Hype Dreams, The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet, written by our guest, Chelsea Wald. This is a live streaming show where you can send questions by email to questionsatthinktechhawaii.com. Chelsea is a science journalist based in the Netherlands with a degree in astronomy from Columbia University and a master's in journalism from Indiana University. Chelsea has more than 15 years experience in writing about science and the environment. Chelsea has repeatedly plunged into the toilet since 2013 when editors first approached her to write about the potential in our stagnating sanitation infrastructure. Seeing an age-old crisis needing to be solved, that is sanitation on a global scale, Chelsea wrote the book, Hype Dream, and it describes creative, innovative, and even transformative solutions to the sanitation crisis and the obstacles that those solutions receive when they're trying to be introduced. Today, Chelsea analyzes three solutions with us on the sanitation solution journey. One is container-based sanitation in Haiti, another is a simple septic system in Indonesia, and the third is a urine diversion toilet in modern-day Europe. So with that, Chelsea walled Aloha. Aloha. Okay, Chelsea, I want to start out before getting into the specifics of your book and the sanitation crisis. Since this is a show on creative problem-solving, can you describe what solutions journalism is and how one could go about doing it? Yeah, so solutions journalism is a growing approach to practicing journalism that I felt was really appropriate to this particular topic, in part because of how I came to it, which was through encountering in my work a wide variety of innovations around sanitation that actually pointed to the fact that there was a larger problem all around the world that I hadn't really known the full scope of. And solutions journalism is a little different from traditional journalism that really focuses on the problem. So kind of the classic expose where you would sort of delve into the depths of a big problem-facing society. Solutions journalism looks at the problem, but what it does is it centers the responses that people are engaging in to help solve that problem. And so by looking at the solution that people are implementing on the ground, then you can also take a look at the problems. And it's not just an approach that looks at... that just uplifts solutions and makes people feel good. It actually uses data and interviews on the ground, research to take a hard look at solutions, look at what's working, what are the barriers, and whether these solutions can be implemented in other places or whether they're really specific to the places in which they're being implemented. To really inquiry whether the solution could be a go fit for other places around the world as well. And what practitioners of solutions journalism believe, hope, and there's some evidence building around, is that this approach is less depressing, less divisive and more constructive approach to journalism. And I think that's important when you're talking about sanitation because, in fact, because the global crisis around sanitation can get very depressing and divisive. That's fascinating. And I think you're going to be telling us three different ways that you customize or you journalize around the customization of these creative and innovative solutions. And can you talk about it? So walk us through your journey today to these three places in the world where you introduce solutions journalism. Yeah, so I'll tell you about three solutions that I encountered and investigated in some detail during my work for this book and in my other journalism work. The first place I like to tell you about is Haiti. And this is an example of the global sanitation crisis. A lot of people may know already that many people in the world don't have safe toilets to use. In fact, about half of the world's population doesn't have what's known as safely managed sanitation. And what that means is that their toilet waste, as I like to call it, doesn't make it safely to treatment. There are many ways that this can go wrong. And in that picture you saw, that's a pit latrine that I saw. That's me in front of a pit latrine in Haiti. And this is really just a hole in the ground. And it doesn't really have a proper cover or a seat on it. It's not very private. It's in someone's backyard. And when I saw it, it was flooding in the area in this low income area. And it was overflowing. So this is a very problematic toilet that I saw. But I was there to go look at a creative solution that is part of a movement called container-based sanitation. And that's slide three. This is actually, in a way, it's a throwback. Because in the 19th century, there was a movement toward this kind of sanitation before the sewer arose. And what you're looking at is a container, like an outside toilet. It looks like a toilet. But inside, there's really a container that it is not connected to a sewer system or infrastructure system like that. But on the next slide, you'll see it's actually connected to a different kind of infrastructure, a series of wheelbarrows and trucks that then take what ends up in the container and someone's home to a composting center where poop gets transformed into a rich compost that can be used in the depleted soils of Haiti. And this is a solution that has climate benefits. And it's got privacy benefits because instead of going out into someone's backyard or going over to a neighbor's pit latrine, people can have these in their homes, regardless of the infrastructure that they have in their homes. What I found when I was visiting Haiti looking at the solution was that one of the reasons this really works there is because the providers, the company that's doing this is very integrated into the community. And I found that that's really important. They've been there over a decade building trust with people. And so people are willing to pay a little bit of money to have the service provided to them. And so that's one of the ways that's one of the soft skills ways that enables this technological solution to be implemented. And there's many more places like the urban low income area in Haiti where this could be implemented around the world and is being implemented. And then we have to consider places where it might not be appropriate. So one of the things that came up as I was looking into container-based annotation is that there are areas like this, for example, in South Africa. However, under apartheid, bucket toilets were the only type of sanitation available to black populations that were being oppressed at the time. And so they have very negative connotations with this idea of a bucket. And so many people think this isn't for that reason, for historical reasons, for culture reasons. That this is not an appropriate solution for that context. So it's about marrying the technology and the culture together. Well, and I want to focus on that point because there were really two leading aspects to your talk with us today about creativity. One is this solution-based journalism. And that's sort of at the intersection of fact and creativity and then implementation. And the second part that came out of our interview was this cultural resistance to taking a solution and implementing it immediately to a crisis. And you just talked about soft skills. And that is a different aspect of being creative. You can come up with your solution, but how do you sell it? And you might be sharing with us, I hope, a little bit going forward here, what some of those soft skills are for the creatives and innovators watching the show. What do you need to do to bypass and even engage the cultural resistance and make it a cultural acceptance? And you're talking about something with a lot of taboo, going all the way to whether it's apartheid or just being clean, what are some of those solutions that you work with or observed and can share with us about getting your creativity accepted? Yeah, because of the nature of sanitation, which comes along with very strong emotions and psychological reactions around taboo, as you mentioned, around privacy, it is a really good case study for what needs to be done in order to make change because people are quite resistant to changing how they do things in the bathroom. And that's completely understandable to the extent that you don't have to change how people do things. Engineers are really looking at that, but sometimes you really do. And if we go to the next slide, you'll see in Indonesia, a helicopter toilet. This is a traditional kind of toilet in Indonesia thought to be perfectly acceptable. It's a, I'm standing on this plank, you will walk out this plank and then there's a hole on a platform over the running water behind the house. So there's a big river back there and you just feed the fish, you know? So to speak. And this was considered to be a perfectly acceptable form of sanitation in Indonesia. And changing that requires changing attitudes as well as convincing people to spend money on things that they wouldn't normally have to spend money on because sanitation is interesting because it's a mixture of a private and a public responsibility. So usually there's a certain portion that a household has to pay for and there's a certain portion that the government pays for. And it's sort of like a whole collaboration. And the gentleman I was talking to in Indonesia, his name is Pak Poon. And he is, and Pak means mister, it's an honor effect, but everyone calls him that in 92. And he is a salesman who sells toilets. He had been actually an electronic salesman when he got into this field and he has changed, you know, his whole business to sell toilets to people who don't otherwise have safe toilets. And I got to wait. So this is the top skill side of selling creativity. So Michael's shown us the next slide too. So tell us what he has to do to sell this taboo, changing taboos sort of investment in that. The technology he's selling is nothing really, really exciting, but it works, you know? It's a container in the ground that contains, it's like, you know, a septic tank he calls. It was very basic, but it worked. So what's that I am? Yeah. And so what he's doing is he's holding up in that picture a paper mache poop that he has made himself. And in his other hand, he has food that he has brought for all the people who are, you can't see them all, but there's a crowd of local people from this community who have come to see his sales pitch. And what he's doing is he's using kind of the emotion of disgust as well as humor. He's terribly funny to teach people, to have people feel at a visceral level, what it means to have poop in the environment. It touches your food and then it goes around. And if you eat the food, you're eating poop or the poop is touching you. And I watched him do this with everybody around and he did this many times. He told me over several years and finally he convinced everybody in the community to switch over. And the community aspect is also very important because sanitation is a community effort. You can have a toilet, but if your neighbor doesn't have a toilet, your toilet doesn't help you all that much because it's really your neighbor's poop that's the problem for you. Okay, so innovators take note. You might have to do show and tell. You might have to do paper mache. But just because you came up with the new wheel, there's gonna be this resistance. And Chelsea's here to show us ways around it. How about some more? Where are you taking us next on the journey? So I'm gonna take you into my own bathroom next on this journey. All right then. Actually outside my home in the Netherlands, I'm calling in from Washington, DC today, but I live in The Hague. And this was not the current house, but my previous house. And that's me standing outside my house. You can see the bicycle and I'm holding jugs filled with my own urine. And then the next slide, you'll see how I collected this urine. This is, I would pee into that pitcher and then I'd pour the pitcher into the jug there. And then someone would come by once a week in a truck to pick it up. Now, why would they do this? I was pregnant at the time. And in the first several months of pregnancy, people make a hormone called HCG that can be used as a fertility drug. And since 1931, there's an organization in the Netherlands called Mothers for Mothers that has been collecting pregnancy urine and making a fertility drug out of it. It goes to a pharmaceutical company. And it's a donation. But there's really a lot better reasons I have to say because this, not that fertility isn't worthwhile, it really is, but this can also be made synthetically. But there's actually a lot of reasons, other reasons to collect urine. This can be called source separation as well. Not to mix everything in together. And one big reason why is that urine is a great source of local nitrogen, which is a fertilizer. And right now, we can say that there's fertilizer shortages around the world because it's a war in Ukraine. And so we can see why it is really important to have alternate sources other than the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers that are made and imported from other countries. And there's a lot of other reasons that source separation is a really great approach for changing the type of sanitation that's used even in places that are considered to have very good sanitation systems that have sewers, that have wastewater treatment plants, but that those systems aren't necessarily like well-suited for the challenges, many of the challenges of the future, including shortages of fertilizers, shortages of water and climate change in general. But the problem is... Well, I wanted to catch up, so think about the problem, but I just want to catch up where we are on our journey. That we went to Haiti and saw these pit latrines and you saw local innovators or maybe international innovators, we didn't touch on that. Who came up with the better mousetrap or poop trap, whatever you want to call it, for containerizing and then taking it away instead of leaving it in the pit. So it's not going into the local agricultural areas uncontrollably. And you showed us the containers. And then in Indonesia, we saw the helicopter solution and were those containers that came in there? Did they introduce... Was the innovation a container in that one? What was that? In that case, the so-called helicopter toilet, which is an unsafe solution was replaced by something known as a septic system or there, which is basically a container underground, an underground container, was a very simple solution. Yeah. So we went from underground to containers and then helicopter above ground into a septic field. And so that's one and Haiti, they needed the one and into Surabaya and Indonesia, they needed this other solution, but they both were sitting there in the last, you know, modern times with unsolved sanitation issues. And then you took us to Europe and you shifted not so much from the collection or distribution model or sanitation, you showed us a way to separate, collect and reuse human waste to make it a human fertilizer or human products or helping with fertility. So that's a third. So when you opened up the Pandora's box of sanitation as a solutions journalist, you saw a lot of movement doing brand new things in different ways about this most basic of functions and that every community has for at least four or five times a day to deal with times the number of people in the world. Yes. So am I caught up on what we just saw? Yes, it's really that everywhere in the world, you know, has a sanitation need, including places that have what is considered to be the gold standard of sanitation, which people are now realizing is perhaps not the best solution for our future. Yeah, so we need an innovation everywhere. That's right. Okay, and then I stopped you because you said there was a problem. Even, of course, it looked like a problem to me for you to pee into a bucket and pour it into a jar. Have there been improvements on that? So one of the problems with the idea of source separation is that people won't accept it because it requires doing something differently. There have been what's called urine diverting toilets that have been developed until now, but they've still been awkward to use. There's a new one in this slide that we're looking at here that has been developed in Austria, and it works in a way that's almost completely invisible to users. So if you had this in place of your current toilet, you would see that the urine, you wouldn't see anything, but what would happen is that the urine sticks to the wall because of the teapot effect and flows what's called the teapot effect. It's like a dribbling teapot when the water comes and flows down the side of this teapot instead of going into your drink. But in this case, the urine goes into a separate hole in the toilet from the hole that the poop flops down into. And in that way, this toilet, which is now available in Europe, this separates the urine from the rest of the toilet waste and it can be separately collected and treated. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done regarding the infrastructure for collection and treatment, but it is in process. That's from a new article that I recently wrote in February for the magazine Nature, the journal Nature, so that you can go check that out if you'd like as well. That graphic was made by that team. Yeah, so that's exciting because it is this idea of creating this major change, but it shows that it's much easier when you can make the change invisible to the people who have to use it, or nearly more. Yeah, it's not just easier, but scalable. I mean, it's scalable. Yeah, you are a bit of a guinea pig hanging into the bucket and this could come in now. I suppose there's a cost and there's re-tooling and introducing this and I don't even know. I suppose there's different countries that would have social legislation around using the hormones, but it isn't just for collecting the hormones. In your case it was, you talked about new fertilizer sources, organic rather than synthetic, and you also talked about new fuel sources that come from that. Now, I remember reading my Perlis book books, The Good Earth and The Good Earth series, she talked about in China that they did waste collection. The farmers did, and it made all the difference in the fertilization and their areas of the world and no doubt in every continent in that day and age and before. And what you're bringing us back to is that modern day solutions are ignoring age old remedies and recyclable activities that these new solutions can bring back. So we're kind of going back to nature with our new technology. And what I thought more about that. What I discovered really was that right now we have one so-called gold standard, the sewer connected to the wastewater treatment plant, the flush toilet that everyone is aspiring to if they don't have it already. But what we need for the future is to move away from that one size fits all idea. And depending on what's needed locally, what's possible locally, what the local cultural context is, we need a wide variety of toilet solutions and innovations that we can tap into so that we have a kaleidoscope of options instead of just one standard of toilet. So Michael put up an interesting slide. Is this an example of some of the multiple solutions? This is a slide that I don't know that we have time for, but this is the backend infrastructure for urine diversion. This is how source separation could work, for example. These are the options beyond the gold standard that you could use. You could collect at the toilet. You can collect in a building. You can collect on a farm or in a house and you can have a lot of different ways to transport pee and poop. So yes, in a way, this is an example of the myriad ways in which these can be implemented. Did you look at all that what NASA does? And we know we do have improvements in that whole system from the work of the astronauts. And maybe you didn't, I didn't ask you that before, but just wondered if you knew what the innovations were coming out of space travel? Well, it is really interesting what's coming out of space travel. Those toilets are the most expensive toilets in the universe, right? But the goal that NASA has for space exploration is really using all of the resources again, because you can't waste resources when you're on Mars. But one of the researchers I talked to who works on NASA toilets and who also works on toilets for very low income urban context said to me, these are all resource limited contexts. It's just the budget that's different. Hey, well, on that note, on budget, I'm gonna have to close our show today. I'm delightful to have you. I wanna let the audience know again that you have been watching The Creative Life on Think Tech Hawaii. And today I have been discussing the importance of solutions journalism and cultural barriers to getting innovation implemented with our delightful guest, Chelsea Wald, who is an author and science journalist. Mahalo for participating and Mahalo to all of our viewers for tuning in. I am Phyllis Bleece and we will be back in two weeks for another edition of The Creative Life. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.