The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

by Rose George

Paperback, 2009

Status

Available

Call number

363.72

Genres

Publication

Holt Paperbacks (2009), Edition: Reprint, 304 pages

Description

Human waste is a major public health threat: population growth is taxing even the most advanced sewage systems, and the disease spread by waste kills more people worldwide every year than any other single cause of death. Even in America, 1.95 million people have no access to an indoor toilet. Yet the subject remains unmentionable. The Big Necessity takes aim at the taboo, revealing everything that matters about how people do--and don't--deal with their own waste. George also explores the infrastructure disasters waiting to happen and the potential saviors: from China's five million biogas digesters to the U.S. Army's personal lasers used by soldiers to zap their feces in the field.

User reviews

LibraryThing member wandering_star

This is a book about shit. (Sorry, but one of the author's key points is that we are all too embarrassed to talk seriously about this important topic, and that includes footling about with words like 'waste' and 'excrement').

I read it on the recommendation of a friend, and I'm glad I did. At first,

I thought it was going to weigh in on the quirky-amusing end of the spectrum, with chapters about the London and New York sewers and the amazingly high-tech Japanese toilet industry, but gradually the book gets more serious - and the reader gets more concerned.

The key fact is that 2.6 billion people worldwide have no access to sanitation. And that does not mean that they have a long-drop or a bucket - it means that they have to shit on waste ground, or in a plastic bag. And yet sanitation is one of the lowest-priority development issues - there's plenty of focus on supplying clean water, but not on the thing that makes it dirty. (As George points out, 'water-borne diseases' is really a euphemism for 'excrement-borne diseases').

George finds some encouraging stories - mainly grassroots projects which are having a positive impact. But these are small-scale and outweighed by the shocking and depressing aspects of the book (say, India's caste of "manual scavengers" whose job is to pick up other people's shit, or the health impact of the US farming industry's use of untreated industrial waste).

And yet, I would describe this as an enjoyable read as well as an important one. I don't know how Rose George manages to maintain both a light tone and a clear sense of injustice. But she does, and the result is highly recommended - I'll certainly be giving copies to many of my friends.

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LibraryThing member tracyfox

The Big Necessity is an important book. Rose George is a hands-on journalist who travels the globe looking at the challenges posed by sanitation in both the developing and the developed world. She descends into London's sewers, test flushes multi-featured Japanese toilets (which even check your

blood pressure), visits Chinese villages powered by the methane generated by a mix of pig and human waste, travels to South African schools in search of clean bathrooms, examines the controversy surrounding the use of biosolids as agricultural fertilizer, and ponders the ideal latrine design for an open defecation-free India.

Although George managed to invoke my gag reflex on more than one occasion, her research left me greatly thankful for yet another aspect of my comfortable first world lifestyle. It also raised my awareness of the myriad sanitation problems faced by the developing world, which I fear will be doubly hard hit if looming water shortages become a reality in the next 25 years. The book is a great introduction to an unpalatable topic, peppered with rays of hope for a better tomorrow, and is recommended for anyone interested in pollution, water or global poverty issues.

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LibraryThing member sonyagreen

George has a combination of Mary Roach and Michael Pollan's writing styles, which fits well with this book. I didn't want to read an academic overview of poo - I wanted a little of the creative non-fiction goodness Roach is famous for. I wouldn't say you need a strong stomach to read this book, but

it is a book about human waste (mostly poo).

The book starts with an introduction to the recent history and current ways we in the US and UK have built waste management systems. I found it fascinating. George goes down in sewers, and interviews sanitation workers who have great stories of all the stuff we throw down the toilet.

That sets you up with a basic knowledge of how waste management works, which is a good lead-in for the next part of the book, which looks at how less-developed countries deal with human waste. There's no judgment in her words - and she reminds us that our system of dumping waste into the ocean doesn't exactly solve the problem.

One unexpectedly great aspect to the book is her interviews with various non-profits who are trying to combat waste-related problems in developing countries. It's a study in how to get a community on board with a program that may be very different and outside their cultural norms to participate in.

There's not a lot of preaching for personal change, but I appreciate that at the end, she talks about what's she's chosen to change now that she's a waste expert.

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LibraryThing member richardderus

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Book Report: The crapper. The toilet. The convenience. The Porcelain God. Of them all, it's the last one that's the most correct. We should worship the waste-disposal vessel in every American home, because it and the infrastructure that supports it, invisibly to the end

users, make modern life as clean, comfortable, and healthy as possible.

Rose George has done us all the service of surveying the world's various systems and non-systems of waste disposal. She reports from the front lines of poop removal all over the planet, and let me just say that, after reading her reports, I am profoundly grateful to her that I now know what I do, without having to go and see and experience and smell all the things she did.

An entire caste of women exist in India who make a living scooping poop. Not dog poop, either. A whole continent, Africa, has dams and irrigation canals and other water control systems, and vanishingly small numbers of waste-disposal plants; water-borne illnesses, usually code for “fecal bacteria contaminated water”, kill millions there.

Aid donors don't want to pay for sewerage systems. Not glamourous enough. Local authorities don't know what to demand. The populace doesn't know there's another possibility. So generation after generation after generation gets sick, most often dies young, and all for the lack of a few lousy billions spent on treating human waste.

Billions, to a country like this one with an annual income in the multi-trillions, ought not to be a big deal. Wouldn't be, either, if we hadn't spent several trillion bombing people who did nothing at all to us. Had to use the Chinese sugar daddy's credit card to do it, too. Now our grandkids will be lucky if they get clean water, since the asshole elite spent all that borrowed money on doing nothing worthwhile.

My Review: Oh dear, I'm off on my anti-conservative ranting again. Sorry. This book made me madder'n a swatted wasp. It makes me want to hurl when I read about the idiot Wall Street banks and bankers whimpering about their taxes, and how poorly they're spent on things like roads and bridges and health care and schools. Next up, and I am dead serious about this, next up is clean water. Privatize it, like the English did! Like we did with cable and phones! (How much more do you spend now on your phone than you did 30 years ago? I found an old bill from May 1984...$25. Now, over $200. Inflation doesn't account for but about half that increase.)

So when dysentery carries off your 90-year-old mother or your grandbaby, conservative voters, do not even think about complaining. YOU DID IT.

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LibraryThing member Scrabblenut

This is a fascinating study of an unmentionable subject. Rose George travels to many countries to see how human waste is dealt with (or not). From London and New York to China, India, and Japan, from Africa to outer space, she covers a lot of territory. I would have liked a little more detail about

some of the best solutions, and finished the book feeling pretty hopeless about it all. Nevertheless, this is an important book and we need to think about solutions to what is a major problem worldwide, for the sake of people's health everywhere. It is worth it to keep reading although you may get bogged down in some of the details early on, because there are very interesting chapters later on in the book.

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LibraryThing member greglief

This eye-opening book taught me a lot about an important topic which is generally overlooked. Anyone who thinks that flush toilets are a right instead of a privilege REALLY needs to read this book!

LibraryThing member Darrol

Another candidate for the most important book I read this year.

LibraryThing member etznab

I heard the author speak on NPR about how the efforts to bring clean water to developing nations is pointless without accompanying sanitation systems. But no one likes to talk about human waste and they certainly don't want to fund it. After reading this book, I am so glad I live in the United

States ... but I was a bit disturbed to learn how little safeguards we have even in a developed and industrialized country. The next time you think that some bad restaurant food made you sick, think again, it might of been the water.

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LibraryThing member Beanti

I really didn't want to read this book due to the subject matter, but it was on my bookclub list! I ended up really enjoying the book as it was very interesting. The world needs better sanitation!

LibraryThing member Othemts

This is a book about shit, the author's preferred term since etymologically it is the only term that uses no euphemism. While someone like Mary Roach would find humor in a global expose on human waste and toilets, George is serious about the deleterious effects of tens of millions of people in the

world lacking sanitation. George tours the decaying sewers of London and New York, and learns more about Japan's toilets that wash and dry the users bottom (which despite being though of as needlessly luxurious in the West are actually better for health, cleanliness and the environment than wiping with paper). The crux of this book is the developing world, places like China, India, South Africa and Tanzania where there are stories of using waste as biogas, attempts to shame people for open defecation, and the uphill battle of charitable organizations to develop proper sanitation for all in a world that would rather not discuss such things. This book is at times difficult to read, but I think it's an important investigation into a topic we can't ignore.

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LibraryThing member KarentheLibrarian

Very thought provoking book that highlights the problems of sanitation in developing countries.

LibraryThing member 2wonderY

I was frustrated by this book because I was looking more for information on new paradigms for human waste management, on the same lines as [[Carol Steinfeld]]'s [Reusing the Resource], but I got a lot of narrative without the design details I wanted.

It wasn't till I scanned a few other reviews

here that I paused and began to appreciate the documentation of the sociology of human waste in various parts of the world. Oh! Yeah. This is a very important aspect of the issue as well.

Going back into the book again to re-evaluate.

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LibraryThing member highlander6022

Must-read for anyone that wants to understand what I guess is a gross-out subject (human waste, the history of how it is or is not treated (in the sense of "processed" around the world), and the ramifications of that. Will convince you that the need for clean water and the efforts to provide it to

underdeveloped nations are basically doomed to failure unless and until human waste products can be fully treated.

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LibraryThing member kaitanya64

As a typical Westerner ( I think) I had never thought about dirty latrines, or even "bush squatting" as anything more than a nasty inconvenience of traveling in developing countries. But George points out the great hazards to human health posed by ...poop. While the tone is often humorous, the

subject is serious, and George provides an easy to read, interesting overview of the problems of human waste and safe drinking water. She visits India, China and Tanzania, among other places, to describe and analyze a variety of attempted solutions. The general conclusion of the book seems to be that this is a problem we can't afford to ignore, but that may have differing solutions in different places. Our Western solution (which is currently seen as the "gold standard") of washing waste away by mixing it with clean drinking water, seems wasteful to me after reading about the variety of other options being explored.

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LibraryThing member FKarr

sad, frightening, infuriating - I was amazed at the conditions in which people live. I wish there were more historical perspective - how did people use to live and deal with this?

LibraryThing member rastaphrog

Whatever term you may use for it, going to the bathroom is something we all have to do. The big question is what facilities does a person have available to do it?

In the "developed" world, we don't think twice about having to do it. Unless you're "roughing it", there's a bathroom somewhere close by

that you can use when you need to. In much of the world tho, a bathroom is a luxury or non-existant.

Rose George travels the world to learn about what is and isn't available to people. What she finds is often disgusting, and would have us "civilized" types cringing in horror. All the same, many of the people she meets and speaks with have no choice in the matter. When you have to go, you have to go, and you have to make do with what's available.

In her travels she see's everything from people going at the side of the road to people using "high tech" toliets that use a minimum of water and do more than just dispose of human waste. She learns about how various countries are working to deal with the problem of disposing of human waste, and what's often involved in trying to change peoples habits.

Chances are good you'll learn more about this subject than you may care to, but at the same time it may fascinate you to see what the actuality of waste disposal around the world involves. This book is best read in small doses to stop and think about some of what you've learned.

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LibraryThing member reader1009

Adult nonfiction. George pursues the problem of human waste and sanitation with all of the curiosity and zeal of Mary Roach, but also makes it clear that this is a very serious problem (that unfortunately no one likes to talk about). "There is nothing funny," she writes, about 2.6 billion people

being without sanitation--no toilet, no pit, no nothing.

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