Originally Posted By: Susan
"Well, composting works, except when it fails - failure of composted fecal matter, a badly designed compost pile, will attract rodents, leading to the spread of disease, leading to the kinds of issues that are addressed and mitigated by a working sanitation system."

Yes, by all means, use hard-to-supply drinking water to flush toilets like we do! Out of sight, out of mind! About 1% of the water on this planet is drinkable, so let's use it to wash fecal matter into the ocean.

Hey, let's run a fresh-water pipeline from the U.S. to Haiti! Or maybe just ship lots and lots of bottled water to do it!
Sue

Well, okay - I'm not a sanitation engineer, nor do I have any expertise in Haiti or tropical climate water supplies. But neither do you - if we are equally ignorant of the specifics, can we agree that someone has solved this issue for adjacent nations - the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Jamaica, Bermuda, all Caribbean nations with similar water dynamics? Water is always in short supply on islands, and while Haiti may prove even more difficult than any of these, can we agree that a sanitation system is at least better than the option you have chosen, which is personal composting or the status quo? There are answers to a local water supply too - collecting rain water via rooftop catchements and storing it in cisterns, very popular I know in Bermuda and Australia. And flush type toilets are not the only option, I have crapped in more than a few toilets on world travels without any running water.