WHEN | Summer 2020

PROJECT NARRATIVE

Open defecation is an issue that continues to profoundly affect India while other countries of comparable economic standing have shifted towards more ecologically and socially acceptable standards. Although the Swachh Bharat mission has built millions of latrines in an effort to declare the nation open-defecation free, the construction of these pit latrines has proven to be an inefficient allocation of resources given the nation’s cultural norms. In Hindu culture, physical and spiritual cleanliness are connected in such a way that renders the maintenance of one’s own latrine a spiritual impurity. The task has been historically relegated to the Dalit caste.  

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This project proposes an overhaul of village sanitation infrastructure to create a system respectful of Hindu spiritual practices while fostering  clean, sustainable, and respectable waste disposal. This is achieved through the construction of composting silos capable of holding one year’s worth of solid waste and carbon supplements in addition to modular scalable restrooms capable of servicing individual households or an entire village through aggregation. This new system allows for the management of waste in such a manner that it is not touched by a person until it has fully composted into fertile soil to be distributed through outlying farmland. This project was designed and developed with my partner Abby Boedigheimer for Volume Zero's Little Big Loo Ideas competition.