I am an engineering professor, and for the past 14 years I've been teaching crap. (Laughter) Not that I'm a bad teacher, but I've been studying and teaching about human waste and how waste is conveyed through these wastewater treatment plants, and how we engineer and design these treatment plants so that we can protect surface water like rivers.
我是一个工程学教授, 但是在过去的14年 我一直在教废话/大便 (笑声) 不是因为我是一个坏老师, 而是我一直在学习和教授 关于人类排泄物方面的知识, 和这些排泄物是如何运达 污水处理厂, 以及我们是如何设计和建造 这些处理厂从而使得我们能够保护 像河水这样的地表水的。
I've based my scientific career on using leading-edge molecular techniques, DNA- and RNA-based methods to look at microbial populations in biological reactors, and again to optimize these systems. And over the years, I have developed an unhealthy obsession with toilets, and I've been known to sneak into toilets and take my camera phone all over the world.
我的科学职业生涯是建立在这样的基础上的, 那就是通过使用最前沿的生物分子学技术、 用基于DNA和RNA的研究方法 去观察生物反应器中的微生物, 然后再去完善这些系统。 这些年来, 我已经形成了一种不健康的对厕所的痴迷, 我通常溜进世界各地的厕所 然后用我的拍照手机 拍下照片。
But along the way, I've learned that it's not just the technical side, but there's also this thing called the culture of crap. So for example, how many of you are washers and how many of you are wipers? (Laughter) If, well, I guess you know what I mean. If you're a washer, then you use water for anal cleansing. That's the technical term. And if you're a wiper, then you use toilet paper or, in some regions of the world where it's not available, newspaper or rags or corncobs.
一路下来,我了解到 这不仅是一个技术方面的问题, 更是一种被称为大便文化的东西。 例如, 你们当中有多少人是冲洗者, 有多少人是擦拭者? (笑声) 如果,嗯,我想你们知道我的意思。 如果你是一个冲洗者,那么你会用水 清洗肛门。这是一个技术术语。 但是如果你是一个擦拭者, 你会使用卫生纸, 或者,在一些用不上卫生纸的地区 甚至使用报纸 或者破布、玉米棒子。
And this is not just a piece of trivia, but it's really important to understand and solve the sanitation problem. And it is a big problem: There are 2.5 billion people in the world who don't have access to adequate sanitation. For them, there's no modern toilet. And there are 1.1 billion people whose toilets are the streets or river banks or open spaces, and again, the technical term for that is open defecation, but that is really simply shitting in the open. And if you're living in fecal material and it's surrounding you, you're going to get sick. It's going to get into your drinking water, into your food, into your immediate surroundings. So the United Nations estimates that every year, there are 1.5 million child deaths because of inadequate sanitation. That's one preventable death every 20 seconds, 171 every hour, 4,100 every day. And so, to avoid open defecation, municipalities and cities build infrastructure, for example, like pit latrines, in peri-urban and rural areas. For example, in KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, they've built tens of thousands of these pit latrines. But there's a problem when you scale up to tens of thousands, and the problem is, what happens when the pits are full? This is what happens. People defecate around the toilet. In schools, children defecate on the floors and then leave a trail outside the building and start defecating around the building, and these pits have to be cleaned and manually emptied. And who does the emptying? You've got these workers who have to sometimes go down into the pits and manually remove the contents. It's a dirty and dangerous business. As you can see, there's no protective equipment, no protective clothing. There's one worker down there. I hope you can see him. He's got a face mask on, but no shirt. And in some countries, like India, the lower castes are condemned to empty the pits, and they're further condemned by society.
这不是一件小事, 它对于理解 和解决卫生问题真的很重要。 这是一个大问题: 全球大约有25亿人 生活在卫生条件不达标的环境中。 对这些人来说,没有现代的厕所可用。 大约有11亿人 他们的厕所就是大街、 河岸或者露天的空地, 对此也有一个技术术语 就是随地大小便, 简而言之 就是在露天的地方排便。 如果你生活在一个 被粪便包围的环境中,你会生病。 它会进入到你的饮用水中, 你的食物中,你身边的环境中。 因此,联合国估计 每年有150万的儿童 因卫生设施不足而死。 那意味着每20秒就有一例可预防性死亡发生, 每小时就是171例, 每天就是4100例。 因此,为了避免随地大小便, 城市里 会修建基础设施,比如说,就像在城郊和农村地区 修建坑式厕所一样。 例如,在南非的夸祖鲁-纳塔尔省, 他们修建了成千上万的这种坑式厕所。 但是当你把规模扩大到成千上万时, 有一个问题就出现了,问题就是 当这些坑都满了的时候会发生什么? 这个就是到时候会发生的。 人们会在厕所的周围排便。 在学校,孩子们会把便排在地板上 然后蔓延到楼外, 然后开始在楼层的周围排便, 这些坑需要被打扫 并且用人工去清空。 那么谁来清空这些坑? 这些工人 他们有时必须下到坑里去 用手清除这些粪便。 这是一桩很脏并且很危险的生意。 正如你所看到的,他们没有防护设备, 没有防护服。 这里有一个正在下面的工作。 我希望你能看到他。 他只有一个面罩,但是没有衣服。 在某些国家,像印度, 低等种姓会被叫去 清空这些坑, 并且他们还会受到进一步的社会谴责。
So you ask yourself, how can we solve this and why don't we just build Western-style flush toilets for these two and a half billion? And the answer is, it's just not possible. In some of these areas, there's not enough water, there's no energy, it's going to cost tens of trillions of dollars to lay out the sewer lines and to build the facilities and to operate and maintain these systems, and if you don't build it right, you're going to have flush toilets that basically go straight into the river, just like what's happening in many cities in the developing world. And is this really the solution? Because essentially, what you're doing is you're using clean water and you're using it to flush your toilet, convey it to a wastewater treatment plant which then discharges to a river, and that river, again, is a drinking water source.
所以问问你自己,我们如何才能解决这个问题, 为什么我们不为这25亿人 修建西式的抽水马桶? 答案就是,这是不可行的。 在上述的某些地区,没有足够的水, 也没有能源, 为了修建这些抽水马桶将要花费数十万亿的美元 去铺设排污管道 和建设这些设施 以及运营和维护这些系统, 并且如果你不能正确的修建它的话, 那么你的抽水马桶 就可能基本上把污水直接排到河里, 就像那些在很多发展中国家的城市里 正在发生的情景一样。 并且这是真正的解决方案吗? 因为基本上来说,你所做的 就是用干净的水 去冲厕所, 再把它运到污水处理厂, 然后再排放到河里去, 而这些河呢,又是饮用水源。
So we've got to rethink sanitation, and we've got to reinvent the sanitation infrastructure, and I'm going to argue that to do this, you have to employ systems thinking. We have to look at the whole sanitation chain. We start with a human interface, and then we have to think about how feces are collected and stored, transported, treated and reused — and not just disposal but reuse.
因此我们必须重新想一想卫生问题, 我们必须改造卫生基础设施, 我正打算说服人们去做这些, 你必须采用系统的思考。 我们必须考虑整个卫生链。 我们从人性化界面开始, 然后我们必须思考粪便 如何被收集和储存、 运输、处理和再利用—— 不仅要处理,还要再利用。
So let's start with the human user interface. I say, it doesn't matter if you're a washer or a wiper, a sitter or a squatter, the human user interface should be clean and easy to use, because after all, taking a dump should be pleasurable. (Laughter) And when we open the possibilities to understanding this sanitation chain, then the back-end technology, the collection to the reuse, should not really matter, and then we can apply locally adoptable and context-sensitive solutions. So we can open ourselves to possibilities like, for example, this urine-diverting toilet, and there's two holes in this toilet. There's the front and the back, and the front collects the urine, and the back collects the fecal material. And so what you're doing is you're separating the urine, which has 80 percent of the nitrogen and 50 percent of the phosphorus, and then that can then be treated and precipitated to form things like struvite, which is a high-value fertilizer, and then the fecal material can then be disinfected and again converted to high-value end products. Or, for example, in some of our research, you can reuse the water by treating it in on-site sanitation systems like planter boxes or constructed wetlands. So we can open up all these possibilities if we take away the old paradigm of flush toilets and treatment plants.
所以让我们从这个拟人化用户界面开始。 我想说,不管你是一个冲洗者或擦拭者, 坐着的或蹲着的都没关系, 这个拟人化用户界面应当干净 和易于使用,因为毕竟 排便应当是一件愉快的事。 (笑声) 当我们展现出 理解这个卫生链的可能性时, 那么后台技术、 从收集到再利用,都不是真正的问题, 然后我们可以应用 适合当地并与当地环境相关的解决方案。 我们可以打开自己的潜能, 例如,这个尿液转移厕所, 这个厕所有两个洞, 前面一个后面一个, 前面的收集尿液, 后面的收集粪便。 因此你要做的就是将大小便分开, 尿液中含80%的氮 和50%的磷, 然后将尿液进行处理 再沉淀以形成像磷酸氨镁 这样的高价值的肥料, 而大便呢首先要被消毒 然后再变成高附加值的终端产品。 或者,举例来说,在我们的一些研究中, 你可以通过用花盆或者人工湿地 这样的就地卫生系统去处理污水 以达到再利用的目的。 我们可以开创所有的可能性, 如果我们能拋弃旧的抽水马桶 和污水处理厂模式的话。
So you might be asking, who's going to pay? Well, I'm going to argue that governments should fund sanitation infrastructure. NGOs and donor organizations, they can do their best, but it's not going to be enough. Governments should fund sanitation the same way they fund roads and schools and hospitals and other infrastructure like bridges, because we know, and the WHO has done this study, that for every dollar that we invest in sanitation infrastructure, we get something like three to 34 dollars back.
你可能会问,谁来为此买单? 嗯,我想要说的是政府 应当投资修建卫生设施。 非政府组织和捐赠机构, 他们会尽他们所能,但是仍然不够。 政府应当在卫生方面进行投资 就像他们投资在公路、 学校和医院 以及其它的基础设施比如桥梁上一样, 因为我们知道,并且世界卫生组织也做了这方面的研究, 研究表明我们在卫生设施上 每投资1美元, 就可以获得3到34美元的回报。
Let's go back to the problem of pit emptying. So at North Carolina State University, we challenged our students to come up with a simple solution, and this is what they came up with: a simple, modified screw auger that can move the waste up from the pit and into a collecting drum, and now the pit worker doesn't have to go down into the pit. We tested it in South Africa, and it works. We need to make it more robust, and we're going to do more testing in Malawi and South Africa this coming year. And our idea is to make this a professionalized pit-emptying service so that we can create a small business out of it, create profits and jobs, and the hope is that, as we are rethinking sanitation, we are extending the life of these pits so that we don't have to resort to quick solutions that don't really make sense.
让我们再回到清理坑式厕所的问题上去。 在北卡罗莱纳州立大学, 我们让学生们想出一个简单的解决方案, 而这就是他们想出来的方案: 一个简单、改良过的麻花钻 可以将这些排泄物 从坑里运上来倒进一个收集桶, 现在这些清理粪坑的工人 不再需要下到坑里面。 我们在南非测试了它,并且成功了。 我们需要使它更加坚固, 并且我们打算在未来的一年里 在马拉维和南非做更多的测试。 我们的想法是把它变成 一种专业化的粪坑清理服务, 这样的话我们就可以利用它创造一个小型企业, 创造利润和就业机会, 这件事的希望所在 就是当我们重新思考卫生问题时, 我们也在延长这些坑式厕所的使用寿命, 这样一来我们就不必去寻求 那些并不是真正的有意义的 快速解决方案。
I believe that access to adequate sanitation is a basic human right. We need to stop the practice of lower castes and lower-status people going down and being condemned to empty pits. It is our moral, it is our social and our environmental obligation.
我认为获得足够的卫生设施 是一项基本人权。 我们要停止那种 把低等种姓和社会地位低的人 叫去清理厕所的做法。 这是我们在道德上、社会上、 和环境上的义务。
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
(掌声)