Disaster sites are often found to be in a sorry state, in almost all factors that play role in making a normal life reasonably decent to lead. While many of these factors, including food, drinking water, sleeping arrangements and protection have been taken into consideration, hygiene is one factor that has still lurked at the backstage. People at disaster sites are subjected to immense inconvenience as far as toilet facilities are concerned, most of the time being forced to get away with their biological waste in the most uncivilized and unhygienic manner. No one has ever thought about what can be seriously done regarding this issue. Till today, the three choices of toilet facilities that people in disaster stricken areas are left with are, filthy chemical toilets, shipping containers that are rendered empty with a shower, thus making it a good bathroom, or empty buckets. Of all these three, the shipping container is the best imaginable option. The remaining two would strike a contradiction to the taste of even the least sensible human being.
However, it seems that there are people who really observe and give results to their observations. Rahim Bhimani is one of them who has come out with a wise and practical solution to the hygiene cry in such areas. Bhimani has designed a toilet that would consist of three different parts, all of them available in flat packs and easy to organize – a tent that is easily transportable, a seating arrangement that is made of highly dense polythene, the top of the toilet exhibiting the use of polystyrene and lastly a cart that is possible to bring in perfect shape just with ten small screws. Along with this, the entire pack also contains degradable polythene bags which are capable of sustaining the weight of 100 to 150 uses.
Apart from hygiene, another factor that presents a nightmare to disaster ridden individuals is that fact that toilet conditions in such areas are grave and lack privacy, which most of us humans value considerably. Here, in the DR toilet arrangement, the privacy issue has been taken into consideration. Hence, the inclusion of the tent. It has a door shaped opening at its rear end, so that the user, after emptying himself can pull off the cart to discard the garbage in a pit. Due to the use of the polythene bags, this process is made easy because the user just has to pull a string and the bag would slide closed. Due to an inner layer that traps the odor inside the bag, unpleasantness is reduced to a zero.
Keeping the present conditions of death and illness in disaster stricken areas in mind, this development is crucial and holds an untold level of importance. It specifically would apply to developing countries, where toilet conditions are very poor. A child death rate of 5000 per day due to waterborne diseases (the water is more than often contaminated with fecal waste), is a stunning figure. Proper action cannot escape a mandated responsibility regarding the hygienic conditions of disaster stricken areas. The DR toilet is the most practical and feasible solution in this regard.
Source: jamesdysonaward