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A child dies every 15 seconds from contaminated water.  Four years ago, Swedish architect and academic Anders Wilhelmson began a pioneering project addressing the lack of adequate sanitation, experienced by 2.6 billion people globally, which spreads deadly diseases among the most impoverished of the world’s population.

Wilhelmson’s brainchild  is the Peepoo bag, a single-use biodegradable sack which functions as a portable personal toilet. The bag is lined with a layer of gauze to avoid contact with bodily fluids and, once sealed, remains odour-free for up to 24 hours. It is a sanitation solution that eliminates the need for water, reducing the spread of lethal pathogens contained within excrement.  It is also a welcome alternative for women and children who  are at risk if they go out to use public toilets at night.

A professor of architecture, Wilhelmson taught a course  on growth and city development at Sweden’s Royal University College of Fine Arts. ‘When you’re out studying cities,’ he explains, ‘you realise that about 60 per cent of them are slums or informal settlements. Everything is difficult in those areas. But housing they could make, electricity is easy to get, water you can get – but sanitation seemed to be very difficult to manage, even on an individual basis. Nobody cares. So I said to myself: “Why are architects concerned about buildings when sanitation is more important? Why not pursue this?”’

After conceiving the idea in 2005, Wilhelmson put together a team of experts comprising engineers, bioplastics experts and industrial designers to investigate the possibilities.  The result is a product that  is self-sanitising and can act  as fertiliser after use. Due to  a thin lining of urea inside the bag, all pathogens are broken down and the bag becomes a source of nutrients for the soil. Encouraged by the findings  of a year’s worth of research, Wilhelmson founded the company Peepoople AB, before applying for a patent in 2007. Field tests began in 2008 and Peepoople began promoting  the product through the likes  of the World Health Organisation and the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Water  & Sanitation (UNSGAB).

he project’s initial launch coincided with the UN-declared International Year of Sanitation in 2008, an effort to solve the sanitation crisis and achieve the Millennium Development Goal on environmental sustainability, which entails halving the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015. ‘That seems very unrealistic today,’ says Wilhelmson. ‘We are modest about what we believe we can achieve. But in the long run, we’re talking hundreds of millions.’

Field tests were successfully carried out in December in Kibera (pictured above), Africa’s largest slum, which houses one million people in around two square miles of Nairobi, Kenya. 300 people used the Peepoo bag for a month before completing questionnaires and attending focus groups. Peepoople is  now in talks to establish long-term funding and production is expected to  begin by the end of this year.

‘As architects, we have  to tackle problems,’ explains Wilhelmson. ‘Architecture is engagement. And you could  take a share of your time to be engaged in major problems.’  Is it that not enough people care? ‘We need to care more, that’s for sure,’ he replies. Ultimately, Wilhelmson believes that the Western world has a  lot to learn, in the event we face our own crises in years to come. ‘Since we are engaged in these areas, we learn a lot which we can use for tackling problems at home. Their need could be the answer to our problems as well.’