The Great Stink

Let’s journey to the city of London, England, in the summer of 1858. Horse-drawn carriages clip-clop through the streets. Ladies wearing giant, tentlike skirts glide past shop windows. Kids stand on street corners, selling newspapers and cigars and fried fish.

But you don’t notice any of that. All you can think about is the overpowering, stomach-turning, eye-watering smell of poop.

As you will soon discover, the entire city is caught in the grip of a stinky crisis. For years, Londoners have been dumping human waste into the Thames [TEMZ], the great river that rushes through the city. Now, London is suffering the hottest summer in recent history. The steaming heat is cooking the filthy river into a bubbling, foul-smelling stew. Newspapers are calling this crisis “the Great Stink.”

The problem isn’t merely gross. It’s also deadly. Over the past 50 years, tens of thousands of people have died from drinking the polluted water of the River Thames. Can the Great Stink force the city to clean up the Thames before thousands more are sickened?

For as long as humans have walked the earth, figuring out what to do with human waste has been one of our greatest challenges. In ancient South Asian cities, clay pipes and brick channels carried waste away from homes. An intricate web of stone sewers lay underneath the ancient city of Rome to take waste out of the city. In China some 1,000 years ago, sewage was pumped through dome-shaped tunnels.

Until the early 1800s, London’s system for dealing with waste was fairly simple. Most homes had a bathroom. People did their business on a wooden box with a hole that sat above an underground pit called a cesspool. These cesspools were usually 6 feet deep and 4 feet wide. When they were full, a “night soil man” would shovel out the waste and sell it to farmers to use as fertilizer. (Poop was known as night soil because it was carted away in the middle of the night, when the powerful odor wouldn’t disturb people.)

But in the 19th century, London—and all of England—was changing. Thousands were leaving their farms to work at factories in cities. Between 1800 and 1850, London’s population more than doubled. By the middle of the century, London was the biggest city in the world, with 2 million people.

Soon there was too much night soil to collect and not enough farmers to buy it. More and more people were forced to empty their cesspools into the city’s creaky old sewers. The sewers, however, were never designed for human waste—they were built to drain rainwater into the Thames to prevent flooding.

To make matters worse, a dazzling new invention was becoming increasingly popular: the flush toilet. Waste could now be magically washed away with the pull of a chain. But because toilets used a lot of water, they caused the cesspools to overflow. To avoid a goopy mess, people began connecting their toilets directly to the sewers—and therefore to the river.

Overloaded with human waste, the Thames grew thick, brown, and foul. Over time, the smell became a stench, and the stench became a reek. And then, in the scorching summer of 1858, it became a crisis.

Londoners back then were no strangers to filth. Soot from factories blackened the air. Mountains of dung from thousands of horses choked the streets. Families crammed into tiny apartments thick with the smell of sweat. And everywhere was garbage: broken dishes, rotting food, animal bones.

Still, the Great Stink of 1858 was an odor more putrid than the city had ever experienced. Londoners fainted in the streets. People miles away threw up after catching a whiff on the wind. Government leaders, who worked in a building beside the Thames, were seen fleeing with tears streaming from their eyes.

Londoners weren’t just disgusted by the stink—they were terrified. At the time, it was widely believed that diseases spread through miasma: dirty, smelly air. And the most feared disease of all? Cholera, a violent stomach sickness that could kill a person within 24 hours. London had already suffered three major cholera epidemics. More than 30,000 people had died. Londoners worried that the Great Stink would unleash a new wave of death across the city.

What few people in 1858 understood was that it wasn’t the smell of the river that was deadly; it was the water. Poop is crawling with germs that can cause dozens of diseases, including cholera. The poop-filled Thames was London’s main source of drinking water. People had essentially been gulping down poison.

London’s new sewer system inspired similar projects in cities around the world, including in U.S. cities like New York. Many parts of those systems are still being used today, more than a century later. Over the years, however, these antique sewers have started to fall apart. Since the 1800s, many city populations have continued to multiply. Climate change is triggering heavier storms that overload pipes with rainwater.

Under these pressures, the original sewers—once a dazzling modern wonder—have begun to leak, break, clog, and overflow. In some places, waste has been oozing into the drinking water supply.

Many experts say we may be approaching a new sewage crisis. If we don’t take action, we could soon be holding our noses through the Great Stink Part 2

Here in the U.S., most of us probably don’t think much about toilets. We go, we flush, we wash our hands, we move on. But what if your home didn’t have a toilet? What if none of the homes in your town had a toilet? What would happen to all that waste? Before long, there would be a crisis, just as there was in London back in 1858.

Today, 4.5 billion people around the world do not have access to safe sanitation—that is, a way to dispose of human waste that won’t harm people or the environment. As a result, untreated human waste ends up in food and water sources. According to the World Health Organization, hundreds of thousands of people die every year from diseases related to unsafe sanitation. Millions more are sickened.

This sanitation crisis mainly affects developing countries, which tend to have high levels of poverty. It might seem like the answer is to build more toilets and sewer systems in these places, but it’s not that simple. Conventional sewer systems require a lot of money to build and a lot of water to operate. Many developing countries don’t have enough of either.

The U.S. faces sanitation challenges too. In the U.S., some aging sewers are crumbling under the strain of too many people using them. Some towns are running out of fresh water.

Could one of these innovative waterless toilets be the solution to today’s sanitation challenges?  

This article was originally published in the April 2020 issue.

The Nano Membrane and the Tiger Toilet were both developed for the global Rethink the Toilet Challenge, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The challenge was designed to encourage innovators to come up with creative ways to solve the world’s sanitation crisis.