Peepoople AB, a Stockholm, Sweden-based company, develops, produces and distributes Peepoo, a biodegradable, single-use toilet used in developing countries. The company began production in 2010 in the slums of Nairobi—with a small manual production—and began high-speed production in 2012 after the development of a production line at hygiene machinery manufacturer Bicma in Mayen, Germany.
 
According to the company’s website, today, over 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation, and 40% of the world’s population don’t have access to a toilet. The company says the product provides an “option to dirty, overfull latrines or defecating in public. The dignity and safety it provides, foremost to women and children, goes beyond basic sanitation.”
 
“After studying the conditions of global urban slum development and the dreadful conditions people were living there I decided to engage,” says Anders Wilhelmson, founder, Peepoople. “My decisive moment was a meeting with so called pavement dwellers in Mumbai in early summer 2005. They explained with utter clarity how the lack of proper sanitation affected their lives and that this was the most difficult question for them to solve.”
 
Wilhelmson adds that the lack of sanitation not only causes diarrhea and other dangerous and deadly illnesses, but girls and women are also sexually harassed when trying to do their needs.
 
Peepoo is made with a high-performance, biodegradable bio-plastic – a mixture of aromatic co-polyesters and polylactic acid (PLA) with small additives of wax and lime. When Peepoo is opened, a thin layer of gauze unfolds inside the bag to form a wide funnel.
 
Inside, the bag contains six grams of urea, a non-hazardous chemical, which Peepoople says is the most common artificial fertilizer in the world. When urine and fecal matter come in contact with the urea inside of Peepoo, dangerous pathogens and bacteria are inactivated. Peepoo’s pouch material is comprised of a nonwoven PLA biopolymer made from sustainable and renewable sources.
 
While Peepoo is not recyclable, the product “fully decomposes to offer safe, valuable nutrients as fertilizer for rural and urban farming,” according to the company.
 
Peepoo is currently used in the Kibera slum in Kenya and in Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Peepoo is also being used in South Sudan refugee camps, and the company delivered one million Peepoos to the Philippines when a typhoon hit last year.
 
According to the company’s website, Peepoople saleswomen and retail kiosks sell Peepoos in Kibera to roughly 10,000 regular users. More than 60 schools in the Silanga area of Kibera also implement the Peepoo system.
 
Since September, the company started producing on Peepoople’s own premises in Ulvsunda in Stockholm, Sweden.