This weekend we celebrated World Toilet Day, a day designed to raise awareness and support for our global sanitation crisis. This year’s campaign focuses on ‘Groundwater and sanitation –making the invisible visible’ – highlighting how inadequate sanitation systems spread human waste into rivers, lakes, soil and pollute our underground water resources – which remains invisible!

But this isn’t just about the pollution of our water resources, there is a human price to poor sanitation. This too remains largely invisible as it happens to the poorest and most marginalised communities. Did you know that 3.6 billion people live without access to a safe toilet? And that every day over 800 children under five die from diarrhoea linked to unsafe water, sanitation and poor hygiene? These are tragedies that we do not have to think about in our own lives, as we turn on the taps and flush the toilets in our homes.

On World Toilet Day and in support of this year’s theme – I wanted to share my reflections as someone who has worked in the water industry for 27 years, as a microbiologist and as someone who is passionate about sanitation and wanting everyone to have access to clean and safe water supplies.

Particularly as a microbiologist, the link between sanitation and disease is something that has interested me for as long as I can remember. It is easy to forget how privileged we are in this country to have access to private toilets pretty much everywhere you go - not just in our houses, but in public places.

In 2022, the United Nations stated that “Currently, the world is seriously off track to meet the promise of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.2: to ensure safe toilets for all by 2030.” This is not just a problem for marginalised communities, but for all of us globally. Groundwater is the world’s most abundant source of freshwater - as climate change worsens and populations grow, groundwater is vital for human survival – but neither its supply nor its quality is guaranteed unless we take action to safeguard our water resources.

This year’s theme focuses on sanitation. Sanitation is often a word that is also associated with women and periods. Whilst women and hygiene charities are championing to replace the words “sanitary products” with “period products” and I encourage everyone to do the same, the link still exists whichever country you live in.

Whilst access to toilets affects both men and women, there is an additional challenge that girls and women face where there is no access to a private toilet - that of managing their periods with dignity.

I visited Malawi in 2016 and saw the challenges young women face first hand. The school we visited was proud of its new toilet blocks - with separate blocks for girls and boys. The toilets were clean and well maintained and interestingly they were composting toilets, with water closets and sewerage systems less common in developing countries.

I spoke to a young woman with one of the aid workers whilst we were waiting for the head teacher to make a speech. She rather embarrassingly said that whilst she was very grateful to the charity who provided the toilets - and they were ‘nice and clean’ - she still didn’t come to school during her periods. The aid worker explained to me that in Malawi, and many other countries, women use homemade sanitary towels to manage their periods. A girl will be given three or four of these when her period starts - often made by a female family member. She then needs to keep these clean, and when they wear out make herself new ones. This young woman pointed out to me that, whilst there were sinks provided for her to wash her sanitary towels and even a washing line to hang them up to dry on, the sinks had only one wall and were in full view of the classroom behind us.

I don’t think you have to be a woman or have periods to imagine that, even with all taboos around periods broken down, this isn’t a comfortable situation for a young girl to experience. What this meant for young girls in this community, and I’m sure in many more, is missing school for several days every month – putting them at an instant disadvantage in the classroom.

But this is not just happening in developing countries. It is estimated that over 137,000 children across the UK have missed school days due to period poverty – with 1 in 10 girls and women aged 14 to 21 saying they hadn’t been able to afford period products.

Interesting there are things we can learn from women in developing countries around investing in sustainable and reusable period products. As an example, that would cut down the estimated 2.5 million tampons, 1.4 million pads and 700,000 panty liners which are flushed every single day in the UK and block our sewers and contribute to flooding and polluting our seas. We’ve all seen the news about storm overflows and the impact that extreme weather events are having on our rivers – our actions or inactions contribute to these problems.

In MOSL we are thinking a lot at the moment about how we ‘Join the drops’ to make the connections between energy, water and carbon as interconnected. The same needs to be applied for how we develop solutions to sanitation globally and how we best support communities across the world to have access to toilets and safe drinking water. This in the interests of communities as well as their natural environments.

“Toilets and sanitation systems must be built or adapted to cope with extreme weather events, so that services always function, and groundwater is protected.” – Worldtoiletday.org

What struck me about the campaign for this year’s World Toilet Day is the important links we have started making between access to toilets and our water supplies. This is big step forward in not only how we consider the whole lifestyle of water but how we recognise these as global, rather than local, challenges. In the same way we cannot protect our planet from climate changes if we only consider the solutions we need in our own countries, we cannot protect our water supplies unless we commit to achieving and taking action towards our global goals.

“We must work on average four times faster to ensure everyone has a safe toilet by 2030. The connection between sanitation and groundwater cannot be overlooked. Time is running out. We must make the invisible visible.” – UN Water

As part of my role as CEO of MOSL, as the Chair of the UK Water Efficiency Strategy Steering Group, as a Trustee of the Don McMath Foundation, as an advisor to eWater Services, and importantly, as a microbiologist, and as a mother, I commit to making the ‘invisible visible’ and working with my colleagues and community to raise awareness and support for #WorldToiletDay and its work.

Find out more by visiting the World Toilet Day website.