‘When we are children, our parents tell us not to talk about shit.This is a really serious problem, what you don’t talk about, you cannot improve’.
Meet Jack Sim, the more socially acceptable name of the man who also goes by Mr. Toilet. You might not have heard of him before, but after this, you will not forget who he is and what he wants to achieve. His goal is to use shit as fertilizer instead of letting it kill millions of people a year. Or as Jack likes to say:
‘Shit is like fire, if you managed it properly, the fire can cook your meals. If you don’t manage it, it burns down your house. If you manage shit, it becomes a fertilizer, if you don’t manage it, it kills you’.
The situation is as follows: the world suffers from a toilet shortage, 40% of the worlds population don’t have access to toilets and in many countries, millions of people defecate outside. One estimate has 4 million people a day in the Mumbai area alone in this situation.
Surprisingly to a lot of us, this is not because of having no other choice, but because for most of them it’s more convenient.India is one of the most extreme examples of this, where 90% of the surface water is contaminated by faeces and toilets are often used as storage. Only 47% are actually being used as toilets.
Mr. Toilet wants to do something about this, so he has created the World Toilet Organization as a platform to raise awareness of how serious health problems are
Sim wants to open a dialogue on this serious taboo on sanitation and this video is a first good step to make things a little bit better.
November 19th is World Toilet Day
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