With every trip to the outhouse we're contaminating groundwater, spreading disease, and costing parks a fortune.
With every trip to the outhouse we're contaminating groundwater, spreading disease, and costing parks a fortune. (Photo: Gabe Farmer/iStock)

An Amazingly Crappy Story

With every trip to the outhouse we're contaminating groundwater, spreading disease, and costing parks a fortune.

In 2009, Canadian researcher Geoff Hill asked park managers across North America what problems they needed solved. Every single one of them said human waste. Since then, Hill has been on a quest to figure out what to do about the fact that U.S. national parks get more than 300 million visitors each year, and at some point most of them have to take a dump. So far, every solution has failed. And so with every trip to the outhouse, we’re contaminating groundwater, spreading disease, and costing parks a fortune. Recently, however, Geoff found an elegant remedy.

Correction: In this episode, we mistakenly say that Geoff Hill licensed a toilet from Ecosphere. The company’s name is Ecodomeo.

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Outside’s longstanding literary storytelling tradition comes to life in audio with features that will both entertain and inform listeners. We launched in March 2016 with our first series, Science of Survival, and have since expanded our show to offer a range of story formats, including reports from our correspondents in the field and interviews with the biggest figures in sports, adventure, and the outdoors.