CurrentTV did a good documentary in the Vanguard documentary series on the 'global toilet crisis', as rural populations need basic education on the health issues.
It covers India's open air problem and how the river gets polluted, and cultural issues around the river, but also a village in Indonesia showing change and education.
I think it's a very good documentary, and you can watch it for free:
http://current.com/shows/vanguard/92482205_worlds-toilet-crisis.htm
Charming facts from the documentary's first 5 minutes:
- Los Angeles' sewage treatment facility gets enough excrement to fill three Rose-bowl stadiums every day
- 3.2 billion people don't have toilets
- In India, 1000 children are killed every day by disease from exposure to excrement
On another note, I've had a cultural comment I heard on Inida:
The culture there is that public areas don't matter to keep clean, it's indoor ones, so people will trash the street outside their home but keep the home very clean.
On a slightly related note, Mad Men made a point about how the US was a bit closer to this in the 1960's, where the family went out for a picnic, and when they were done, they just dumped all their trash off the blanket and left it there, without any notice of the pollution - based on cultural norms at the time - and if it's hard to remember that, remember how the US government had a major education program to get the US public not to litter in the Eisenhower to Nixon period - when the EPA was created as well.
Ever see this public education campaign (from when the government served the public interest rather than the polluters like the Koch brothers)?
Flush toilets weren't really invented until the mid 19th century; consumer toilet paper only started being made in the US a little over a century ago. From one web site:
What did people use before toilet paper? Well, just use your imagination: grass, leaves, fur, mussell shells, corncobs... The ancient Greeks used stones and pieces of clay; ancient Romans used sponges on the ends of sticks, kept in jugs filled with salty water. Mideasterners commonly used the left hand, which is supposedly still considered unclean in the Arabian region.
Corncobs and pages torn from newspapers and magazines were commonly used in the early American West. The Sears catalogue was well-known in this context, and even produced such humorous spinoffs as the "Rears and Sorebutt" catalogue. The Farmer's Almanac had a hole in it so it could be hung on a hook and the pages torn off easily.
In 1935, Northern Tissue advertised "splinter-free" toilet paper. Yep, you read that right; early paper production techniques sometimes left splinters embedded in the paper.
In 1942, St. Andrew's Paper Mill in Great Britain introduced two-ply toilet paper