Composting Toilets and Poverty Alleviation
Channel: Gabriel Arboleda
Date: 2013-07-01

This video explains the rationale of an approach to sanitation with low-income rural settlers, with a special focus on indigenous peoples. The video also shows the approach in action, through clips from a sanitation workshop in an Amerindian village located in Guyana's Barima-Waini Region. 

Key in this approach is to focus on processes, rather than providing objects, or market commodities such as industrially produced composting toilets. The approach, an "ethno-sanitation approach," is based on six principles: 

1. Not a commodity
2. Focus on the process, not the product
3. Not an imposition
4. Simple
5. Fun
6. You also do it

This is a fragment of a lecture at Hampshire College's "Reinventing the Toilet" architectural design studio (Spring 2013).

In detail, this presentation discusses:

- Politics of commodities with regard to sanitation
- Non-commodity based sanitation solutions
- The pit toilet
- The common rationale for composting toilets as a sanitation alternative for low-income rural settlements
- Is there a feasible dry toilet alternative for this type of settlement?
- Some ethno-sanitation principles towards a feasible alternative
- The bucket composting toilet as an alternative that fulfills these principles
- The bucket composter as an emergency toilet

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