An Epidemic Waiting To Happen.

March 22 was clean water day, in which UNICEF brought to peoples attention that more than 3 billion people around the world lack access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation systems. Globally at least 1.8 billion use a drinking water source contaminated by faeces and half of the world's population will be living in water-stressed areas by 2025. The water problem is particularly serious in Africa's largest City Lagos, Nigeria, a City of 21 million. According to one community leader, "when we fetch water it foams and smells like petrol and detergent were poured into it." Obviously, the problem is compounded by one of the most disgusting aspects of life under Capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries, the growth of Mega-cities. In cities such as Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Cape Town and Lagos, millions live in shanty towns, where there is no sanitation and clean drinking water. Somehow we can't imagine the capitalist class using the wealth they've worked so hard to steal, putting in sewers and water lines for the residents of a shanty town.

Be that as it may, nevertheless they wouldn't have to. In 2011, the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation, announced a competition to invent a toilet that did not need a sewer connection, or electricity and cost less than 5 cents per user per day. The winner was an entry from Caltech that uses photovoltaic cells to power an electro-chemical reactor that treats human waste, producing clean water for flushing or irrigation and hydrogen that can be stored in fuel cells. The system is entirely self-contained; it has no need for an electrical grid, a sewer line or a treatment RiverBlue2016 2 facility. The only input the toilet requires, beyond sunlight and human waste, as simple table salt which is oxidized to make chlorine to disinfect the water. 

So once again, capitalism rises to the technical challenge, but will the toilets be used in shanty towns? It's doubtful because it will still cost the capitalists money to put them there; money they won't see a return on, no matter how cheap they are to use. So once again, capitalism fails the social challenge. It should be obvious to anyone that a shanty town is an epidemic waiting to happen and sooner or later it will. 

Steve and John.