Toilets for Mushrooms: An Experiment to Improve Sanitation
November 19, 2010
By Rob Goodier, Engineering for Change
This is a story of how mushroom sales are solving a sanitation problem in rural Bolivia. Or if you’re a rural Bolivian, it’s a story of how building toilets can improve the mushroom harvest. It’s a question of perspective. Let’s start with toilets.
There are not enough toilets in rural Bolivia. Fewer than half of the people have regular access to sanitations systems, and fewer than one out of 10 rural Bolivians have private toilets, the World Health Organization reports.
No luck with free toilets
Giving away free toilets, however, has not solved the problem. Or, rather, it has only solved part of the problem. Development organizations have had the good idea to equip rural Bolivian communities with urine-diverting dry toilets, which composte the solid waste and divert the urine from a cup in the front of the bowl to a separate tank where it is fermented to become fertilizer.
Most people, however, don’t use them. Depending on the study, only one fifth to one half are used often and correctly. Further, a telling ethnographic study by the Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV) reports that when asked the benefits of such toilets, most people who use them do not mention that they improve community health, produce free fertilizer, or operate without water or plumbing. Instead, the top benfit is that they are provided for free. When the survey-makers came by, however, the Bolivians hadn’t known about the mushrooms, yet.
Oops, mushrooms
Fifteen years ago, the Bolivian state of Cochabamba reforested part of the municipality of Cuchumuela, located about one and half hours from the state capital, right in the middle of the country. The Monterrey pines (Pinus radiata) they planted happened to be hospitable to a kind of mushroom called a bolete.
Boletes, it turns out, are delicious, and expensive in Bolivia. A family in Cuchumuela can earn about $800 (US) per year from mushroom sales, the SNV found. Reforestation in Cochumuela served not only to balance water tables and conserve top soil, but produced an unintentional cash crop as well. The harvest, however, isn’t big enough for everyone to take part.
Water for People
To grow more mushrooms, people in Cuchumuela need more pines. The new pines need fertilizer. That happens to be one of the several specialties of urine-diverting dry toilets. Local business groups hit on that connection, and Water for People-Bolivia, a branch of the international water and sanitation aid organization, listened.
What do you think?
