Toilet Tales: China | PRI’s The World.
With its flashy lights and fast construction, Ordos is a city on the make – a coal boomtown that boasts it’s now got the highest income per capita of any urban area in China – much of it, concentrated in the hands of a few coal, oil and natural gas tycoons. But less than a decade ago, Ordos was dingy, dusty and poor, with frequent cuts of water supply. That’s why it caught the eye of the Stockholm Environment Institute, which had successfully promoted the use of dry toilets in rural areas in developing countries, but wanted to see how they’d work in a city.