04 | WTF (WHAT THE FAILURE)
🤷♀️ Welcome back to WTF (“What the Failure”) Wednesday where I share different examples of failure in international development, aid, and poverty alleviation writ large.
👉 The goal is not to point fingers, but to resurface learnings so we don’t all make the same mistakes. Today is a social enterprise edition.
🎉 Happy New Year! Maybe you saw the footage of workers in New York’s Times Square cleaning up confetti and … used adult diapers. 🫨
That reminded me, whatever happened to Peepoople? I tried to look at their website but it seems to have gone out of business.
🛍️ The Peepoo bag was created by a Swedish architect after hearing from an Indian woman that she didn’t need an architect, she needed sanitation.
🐕 I wonder if he had a dog, because he says he immediately thought of a bag. Anders’ twist was making the bag biodegradable and adding something that made the contents into fertilizer. Neat, huh?
It got LOTS of glowing media coverage, for example:
- Fast Company: This Toilet Is Changing Sanitation, Because The Toilet Is Just A Bag
- NY Times: For Pennies, a Disposable Toilet That Could Help Grow Crops
- Sydney Morning Herald, Is it a bag, is it a toilet? No, it’s a Peepoo
They even got a Grand Challenges Canada grant in 2014 (to study its impact).
But wait, I have questions.
🗑️ Have any of those writers have ever had to poop in a bag or a trashcan? I have. It’s really hard to aim, especially if any of the contents are liquid (as happens with diarrhea, or pee).
Why didn’t any of the interviewers ask the co-founders “Did you ever use one? #1 or #2?” “How would you feel if your grandmother or small child needed to use one of these?”
🧻 And what about wiping? Are you supposed to carry around toilet paper? If you’re a washer (using water to clean your nether regions), where are you supposed to get water for that? And where does all that fecal matter splash if not into a toilet?
👐 Washing hands? That’s not possible with a plastic bag. Maybe the poopreneur wasn’t familiar with studies that show hands get MORE contaminated with fecal matter if there’s a toilet without handwashing nearby.
🕶️ A poop bag doesn’t address the issues of privacy or dignity.
🧽 How are you supposed to clean the stand for the bag without water at home?
🕳️ Where were people supposed to bury the bags in an urban slum? What happens if it floods? Where are they supposed to use the fertilizer?
Peepoople seems to have pivoted from having people selling bags for everyday use toward emergency use, even though their model doesn’t seem to meet SPHERE emergency standards.
Maybe that’s what put them out of business. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Image by Wilfried Pohnke on Pixabay
