So, what does a work day look like for a global development engineer? Jason Kass, the founder of Toilets for People, might not call himself a “global development engineer,” but he shows us one of his days building toilets with pictures.
Kass is a contributing editor at E4C, an environmental engineer and a member of Engineers Without Borders — New York Professionals Chapter. He recently returned from a marathon of toilet installation in villages along the banks of the Amazon river and its estuaries in Peru. He and his team installed 17 bathrooms in 10 days, a new Toilets for People record.
The toilets are a design of their own. They call it the Compact, Rotating, Aerobic, Pollution-Prevention, Excreta Reducer, which, by amazing coincidence, happens to spell out the acronym “CRAPPER.”
The toilet is made entirely of locally available materials including plywood, hardware, toilet seats, 5-gallon buckets, and a 15-gallon drum, and they cost about $100. And, importantly, “Any local who knows his or her way around a basic tool kit can maintain and repair them,” Kass writes in the article: High-Tech Toilets? What We Need Is a Low-Tech Toilet Revolution.
This is a day in the life of a global development engineer building bathrooms in the Amazon.
The team buys provisions for the expedition to the Peruvian jungle.
The team is collecting money from customers that purchased toilets.
The team buys plastic drums in Iquitos, Peru.
The teams buys used and damaged water containers to make into urinals.
The team buys toilet seats at the hardware store.
The team collects free saw dust from a saw mill to be used as a cover material for waste in the composting toilet.
The team stages materials in Nauta to put on the boat to go down river.
Toilets for People’s “Magic Bus” to transport materials from Iquitos to Nauta, Peru.
Inside the “Magic Bus.”
The team buys wood to build CRAPPERs in Nauta, Peru.
Warning! Don’t grab onto the trees while walking through the jungle – thorns! Kass still has one in his thumb.
All in a day’s work. Kass, second from the left, dines out with the Toilets for People team in Iquitos.
For more context, here’s a video a part of the building process:
