What is The POOP Project?

The POOP Project is a New York City-based organization founded by activist Shawn Shafner, who wants to change the way we think about our own waste and start conversations about “sustainable sanitation.” The organization focuses on three main areas; the environmental and ecological impacts of poop, cultural conversations about poop, and the global sanitation community.

Poop, Shafner says, could be utilized to nourish agricultural fields, build homes, and power cities. Instead, in the United States, Americans flush their poop away and are complacent to allow waste to remain as waste. After all, everybody poops.

Earlier this month, The POOP Project helped fund the release of a documentary called FLUSH, which follows human waste from a source in New York City, through the sewer system, and to the processing plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

The documentary exposes a harsh truth about our poop; that sanitation systems in the United States are often inefficient. Documentary Director Karina Mangu Ward take a trip into the NYC sewer system with longtime Hudson River steward John Lipscomb. Mangu Ward and Lipscomb identify overflow sewage overflow ports along the river and journey into “the belly of the beast” to see the river of sewage formed by New York City’s 8.5 million residents. This sewage overflow is largely due to the Combined Sewer Systems found in New York that have stormwater run-off mixed with raw sewage.

They see the outlet ports where, during any major rain storm in New York, raw, untreated sewage to flows into the Hudson River. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, roughly 850 billion gallons of raw sewage overflow into rivers and oceans in the United States every single year. This raw sewage is dangerous for public health and our ecosystem.

FLUSH goes beyond the environmental impact of our human waste to talk about the culture surrounding “bathroom talk.” Mangu-Ward interviews a child psychologist named Dr. Tom Duhamel who treats children who suffer from chronic constipation, which according to Duhamel, is between one in every 10 to one in every 15 children in the United States.

“It is not a small problem and I think it is an increasing problem,” Dr. Duhamel said. “People have such an aversion to poop. They don’t want to look at it. They certainly don’t want to touch it. It really is ‘I’m going to flush it and forget it.’ All parents should understand that they influence their childs’ attitudes towards poop. It is important for kids to understand that poop is something that every living creature does.”

Chronic constipation can often be attributed to shame about pooping. Part of the mission of The Poop Project is to heal the cultural shame that makes “potty talk” taboo.

“Rather than accepting a culture that makes us feel guilty for doing something that everyone else does, we could create a world that is hospitable to the reality of having a body and all of its needs,” Shafner said.

Though FLUSH does not cover this part of the mission, The POOP Project also provides education on the global sanitation crisis. 2.5 billion people, 40 percent of the global population, still live without access to safe toilets. This problem is so important it was included as one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

“Children are especially vulnerable to diseases caused by the lack of proper sanitation,” UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman said from Hong Kong. “Poor sanitation, hygiene and unsafe water claim the lives of an estimated over 1.5 million children under the age of five every year.”

To learn more about The POOP Project, please visit www.thepoopproject.org