Despite being land-rich in coal and natural gas, Inner Mongolia (an autonomous region in the northern deserts of China) has a serious scarcity of water. However, the wealth being produced from these resources has brought a great influx of people to the area, all seeking to cash in on the good times, and all of whom want to drink water from time to time.
The residents of one of the large cities in the region, Dongsheng, decided that one way to save water was to go green (as green as you can in a desert anyway) and initiated a program to install non-flushing, composting toilets.
The Stockholm Environmental Institute (SEI), a Swedish outfit that has worked for years solving problems in extreme climates that have water shortages, came up with the idea of the "dry toilets."
To date, 832 Swedish-designed dry toilets have been installed in Dongsheng, which have saved households a third of the water that they consume. Although there were initial teething problems with the technology -- locals complained of the unsavory fecal aroma in their houses -- these have now been wiped out.
As Dongsheng resident Mang Lai put it, "We were skeptical to begin with, but now that the construction has been modified it is all working fine. To live in this region in the long term we have to regulate the consumption of water."
Normally we think of composting toilets being put into log cabins and other kinds of one-story buildings. The Dongsheng non-flushing toilets work perfectly well in four- or five-story buildings. The only real drawback is for those folk living on the fifth floor, who have to drag a twenty-kilogram sack of turds downstairs for disposal once the container is full.