Firmenich, the world’s largest privately-owned perfume and taste company and a member of the Toilet Board Coalition (TBC) has conducted extensive research into the impact bad smells have on toilet usage in low-income areas.
Findings show that a key reason for declines in toilet usage in low income communities is that the traditional scientific and technical focus of solutions to deliver safe sanitation can often overlook basic ideas of user experience. Put simply – public toilets in low-income communities often smell so bad that people do not want to use them.
The Toilet Board Coalition, a business-led partnership and platform addressing the global sanitation crisis by accelerating the Sanitation Economy, is working with organisations such as Firmenich to discover new ways to change sanitation from being an unaffordable cost for governments into a profitable and scalable business opportunity.
4.5 billion people lack safely managed sanitation services and at least 892 million people continue to practice open defecation every day. With this comes a host of negative impacts including waterborne disease contraction and infant mortality.
The World Bank has estimated sanitation to be a $250 billion cost to society each year. This new, business-led approach to the issue is transforming the economics of sanitation. By bringing together public, private and non-profit organisations, the Toilet Board Coalition has the opportunity to set new standards for sanitation that incorporate its real value for people, and in doing so unlock significant benefits for both business and society.
Harnessing their long-standing scientific and technical knowhow, Firmenich conducted on-site research to aid the development of solutions within the Sanitation Economy in emerging markets. They discovered that bad smells were one of the biggest disincentives to public toilet usage in each of the countries they conducted the study in. 87% of respondents in Kenya, 70% in South Africa, 62% in India and 51% in China identified malodour as one of the biggest reasons they do not regularly use public sanitation infrastructure.
This leads to poor maintenance of facilities, causing increased malodour and a decline in usage, compounding the issues sanitation solutions are trying to address. As a result, Firmenich has come up with a simple solution to drive toilet usage – make them smell nice.
To test the impact of smell to increase toilet usage, Firmenich developed a new, low-cost malodour counteractant technology including air freshener and disinfectant liquids that capture bad smelling molecules and release a pleasant fragrance. By ensuring that cleaning products also serve a malodour counteractant role, the user experience of community toilets could be transformed.
Firmenich trialled their malodour technology in Pune, India, the world’s first Smart Sanitation City. The Pune Smart City project is a Toilet Board Coalition initiative that aims to embed data monitoring of public and community toilet usage, sewage treatment operations, infectious disease circulation and other health indicators into the city’s architecture.
Results of the study showed that that 52% of people with unsafe toilet practices were willing to shift to community toilets if they were cleaned and treated with malodour technology. Following the trials, the share of respondents willing to use community toilets rose to over 70% in some cases.
In many developing countries, there is no public funding available for sanitation solutions, so privately funded toilets often become the only option. Firmenich found that 90% of those who used toilets with the malodour technology considered the facilities “much better than usual” and would be willing to pay for access. This is a key way to ensure that the infrastructure is sustainable and continually serviced in the absence of public funding.
This is essential to proving that scaling up new Sanitation Economy approaches by businesses can ensure increased access and transform the economics of sanitation into commercially viable opportunities.
