About 72% of all households in Mongolia use pit toilets which cause large-scale soil, water, and air pollution in populated areas. 90% of soil pollution in the capital city was found to contain substances that are directly harmful to human health. Sulfur and ammonia produced from pit toilets rank 4th in toxicity on the scale of toxic gasses.
As a mother of two, the increasing health risk caused by unhygienic pit toilets really concerns me. Though I myself live in a comfortable apartment with a modern flush toilet, the heavy pollution of soil, water, and air directly and adversely affects all of our health.
A survey shows that the main reasons people don’t change their disease-breeding pit toilets are as follows:
1. Non-implementation of urban planning
2. Lack of engineering infrastructure
3. People`s attitude towards environmental hygiene is weak
4. Lack of information to citizens about health and sanitary facilities
5. Expensive technologies
A small NGO, Local solutions, of which I’m one of 5 board members, decided to tackle the 3rd and 4th reasons, and implemented a nationwide public education campaign.
Even though the formal education system is quite developed in Mongolia, very little attention is paid to modern lifestyle education and training. Migrants from the countryside do not know how to build and use modern toilets because no one educates them on the benefits and importance of doing so.
Our training team travelled 20 thousand miles conducting 46 trainings in all 21 provinces of Mongolia and 9 districts of the capital city throughout the entirety of spring and summer, but only managed to reach about 3000 people.
I am a television professional and last spring it suddenly hit me: I should make a documentary on toilet change. I know that television content can reach not 3000, but 30 000 even up to a million and half people within a second. Since that eureka moment, I had been in search of a main character, but didn’t really have much time to invest due to the constant training sessions and travels.
Luckily, Adi, my main character now, approached me during a training session in the South Gobi province, and asked me to travel with her to see a new settlement area that borders China. It turned out that she was a local activist fighting to protect her home town’s environment from thousands of new migrants and drivers. As a native, she was happy at the prospect of development through the benefit of their rich mineral resources, but was unhappy with the execution.
When I first visited the coal town, I was truly shocked. It was like a war zone. The air was smothered with coal dust, and the white cover of all the gers had adopted a dark grey color. There were no decent living conditions in the area: no toilets, no doctors, nothing but small shops, karaoke bars and ger motels. These people were only there temporarily, so they didn’t have any drive to change it.
The worst part is that one of the world’s biggest coal mining expeditions, Tavan Tolgoi is just in its first phase, and has a total estimated resource of 6.4 billion tonnes of coal. It is set to be mined for over a hundred years. Unfortunately, the current situation is one of the many consequences of the lack of engineering infrastructure and non-implementation of urban planning in Mongolia. Therefore my main character Adi’s campaign is essential in this newly established settlement area. Her journey to install dry toilet options in the desert will help change the current thinking about urban planning in Mongolia. The change to dry toilets can shift Mongolia’s reliance on costly, water guzzling flush toilet systems to a variety of feasible eco-friendly options.
Also through the workshop on eco – toilets conducted for 10 thousand truckers by Adi, and process of building them, the film itself delivers and spreads some educational information on how properly build and use eco-toilets.
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