If you want to read a great book on the history and political economy of sanitation, read Richard Evans' Death in Hamburg, a meticulously researched history of sanitation and the cholera epidemic in this German city in the late years of the 19th century.

Mathew Lippincott prepared this blog post, http://www.phlush.org/2012/11/27/a-rough-history-of-sanitation-in-the-west/, for PHLUSH.org before the Random Hacks of Kindness event in Seattle in December 2012, participating in Toilet Hackers. The event in Seattle was cancelled but the info is great and Trevor asked us to share it with you all. Below is an excerpt:

Researching sanitation is a passion of ours, so we, Molly and Mathew, thought we’d put together a very rapid rough history of sanitation in the US, Canada, and Western Europe in the past 200 years. There’s a stack of citations below, but the general thrust of this history can be credited to Joel A. Tarr’s essay Water and Wastes and the 1979 National Science Foundation report he chaired, Retrospective Assessment of Wastewater Technology in the United States, 1800-1972.


Oxygen is bubbled into to tanks of sewage to encourage soil bacteria to devour the nutrients in sewage. Keeping soil bacteria alive in water is energy intensive.
Piped water service began in the early 19th century before sewers were used for anything other than stormwater drainage. Convenient water that didn’t have to be hauled from a shared pump led to a 10-fold increase in water consumption that overwhelmed infiltration and open drainage systems. Worse, wealthier urbanites installed flush toilets. This new, unanticipated technology started overflowing the cess pits that otherwise contained undilute excrement that could accumulate for years without having to be emptied (facts and figures below). Sanitary sewers were built to mitigate overflowing sewage and eliminate the health risk related to the threat of disease from miasmatic sewer gas. These sewers failed to stop the spread of typhoid, increased its infection rates downstream of sewer outlets, and the miasmatic gasses they were designed to mitigate turned out to not exist.

Read more: check out http://www.phlush.org/2012/11/27/a-rough-history-of-sanitation-in-the-west/ with links to primary sources.

In related toilet news. Mathew just finished a Tedx Talk on March 23rd, in Portland about toilets and sanitation. It should be online soon.

Thank you,
Molly Danielsson
mdml.co