Happy World Toilet Day — officially observed Nov. 19 by the United Nations to highlight a global crisis: about 3.4 billion people lack “safely managed sanitation,” and more than 300 million still practice open defecation.
A toilet by itself isn’t enough. Without systems to remove, transport and treat human waste, a toilet is little more than a porcelain seat. As Dr. Stephen Luby, professor of medicine at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, puts it: low-income communities need effective sewers and sanitation that separate water and food from the human fecal stream.
On the ground the consequences are visible. In parts of Nairobi, gutters overflow with trash and floating diapers and residents resort to “flying toilets” — defecating into plastic bags and throwing them away. Waste management has long been a problem (historic cities once emptied refuse from windows), but with more than 7 billion people on Earth modern sewage requires substantial engineering. Those systems are expensive and often hidden from view: in the U.S., roughly 15,000 liters of water per person each year are used just to move sewage to treatment plants.
Because building full-scale sanitation networks is costly and slow — especially in low-income settings — experts are pursuing alternative and incremental solutions. Luby advocates for composting or dry sanitation approaches that safely break down fecal matter into usable compost through simple inputs (for example, sawdust) and properly designed, ventilated containers.
UNICEF’s sanitation lead Ann Thomas adds that climate change is creating new stresses. The 2025 World Toilet Day theme, “sanitation in a changing world,” reflects growing concerns that heavier rains and floods can overwhelm combined sewer systems and send untreated sewage into waterways, even in wealthy cities like New York. That reality underscores the need for funding and adaptive upgrades to make sanitation systems resilient.
Practical household-level methods offer other gains. In parts of India, twin-pit latrines are common: two pits are used alternately so a filled pit can rest long enough for pathogens to die off, after which its contents are safer to handle and may be used as compost.
And what about the name? Thomas says “World Toilet Day” works because the word toilet breaks taboos and, with a touch of humor, draws attention. “World Sanitation Day” doesn’t have the same ring, she notes. Luby joked he’d back “World Poop Day,” an idea Thomas laughed at while saying the current name “walks the line between not being offensive and being fun.”