Personality - Jack Sim (G.Read)

Barun Roy

Jack Sim of Singapore is on a mission to popularise sanitation solutions that developing countries need.

Remember Mr Condom? There was a time when even the mention of his name would evoke laughter and ridicule, but Mechai Viravaidya, the indomitable condom crusader from Thailand, is today a respected name in the global fight against AIDS. It’s because of his campaigns that condoms have become a legitimate public-interest topic, even in prudish India. No winks, no blushes.

Now meet Mr Toilet. His name is Jack Sim and he is from Singapore. Like Mechai, he is also a man with an unusual mission. Having made a little fortune in the construction industry, he retired from his business while he was still very young, only 40, and decided to devote the rest of his life to a public cause he believes is very important: Toilets.

First he established the Restroom Association of Singapore — that was 1998 — to ensure that Singapore’s public toilets are maintained at a high level of cleanliness and efficiency. Then, in 2001, he founded, yes, a World Toilet Organisation (WTO) to bring all stakeholders together under a common campaign umbrella to bring the subject of toilets into the social and political mainstream. In 2005, he established the world’s first ever toilet college — yes, you are reading correctly — in association with Singapore Polytechnic, to train people in toilet design, maintenance, cleaning, and eco-friendly sanitation technologies.

Why toilets? When you get to know, you won’t laugh anymore. According to United Nations estimates, 2.5 billion people, or 40 per cent of the world’s population, have no access to even basic sanitation and some 1.8 million children die every year of diarrhoea caused by contaminated water and defiled surroundings. This is a serious public health as well as environmental concern and it’s not for nothing that the UN has included sanitation among its major development goals for this millennium. It wants nations to adopt policies that will bring down the number of sanitation-deprived population to half by 2015 and zero by 2025.

It’s also a question of water. Water is a scarce resource and isn’t available everywhere in equal measure: in some places not at all. If we are talking of flush toilets, we are talking of 13 litres of water per flush. That’s a lot of water. So, we need to think of things like low-water-use, or even waterless, toilets, if we are to meet our sanitation goals.

There’s also a larger issue. Is human waste a total waste, or should it be regarded as a perennial resource that, transformed, could be a source of cheap burnable fuel? Human waste harvesting isn’t a new idea. Many of China’s 15 million household biogas systems use it. In India, Bindeshwar Pathak’s Sulabh International set up a human waste digester in Patna as early as 1982 and currently has 68 biogas plants connected with large-sized public toilets in many states.

Just recently, the US city of San Antonio, in Texas, announced plans to harvest methane from human waste on a commercial scale and turn it into clean-burning fuel. It’s claimed that about 1.5 million cubic feet of natural gas could be produced daily from over 140,000 tonnes of bio-solids that San Antonio residents produce every year.

But so far this idea hasn’t quite flown and it’s Jack Sim’s ambition to make it fly. Every year, it’s said, more than 200 million tonnes of human waste and vast quantities of wastewater and solid waste go untreated around the world. Only a revolution in thinking could prompt us to make better use of this huge unused resource. Which is why Jack is serious about his new-found calling and has organised a “World Toilet Summit” every year since the WTO’s founding. It’s a platform where stakeholders from both public and private sectors get together to exchange ideas and information on toilet and toilet-related technologies.

As you read this column, this year’s summit will just be ending in, of all places, Macao after a three-day run at — guess where? — The Venetian, the world’s largest casino with 3,400 slot machines and 800 gambling tables. Macao and The Venetian are Jack Sim’s way of saying that toilets deserve to be treated as fashionably as, say, a global economic forum. This year is the UN-designated International Year of Sanitation, so the summit’s theme, appropriately, was “Driving Sustainable Sanitation Through Market-Based Initiatives.” Exhibits included self-cleaning toilets, solar-powered commodes that run without water, and recyclable systems that convert waste into biogas.

New-generation toilets are already in use. “Enviro Loo,” for example, developed by a South Africa-based company, is a self-contained dry toilet that requires no water, chemicals, or power. Pathak’s “Sulabh” toilets require only one cup of water. But they don’t have the popularity they deserve. Policymakers have yet to realise that these revolutionary ideas offer precisely the sanitation solutions poor developing countries need, and it’s Jack’s mission to get this message across.