BILL GATES

Inventing a Toilet for
the 21st Century

August 14, 2012 | By Bill Gates   Posted on the gates notes

Bill Gates. The geek who changed the world
and wants to change it again

I announced the winners today of the foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge—a competition designed to encourage breakthroughs in clean, affordable sanitation.

Today I attended what has to be one of the oddest summer fairs ever. A year ago, the foundation launched an initiative to tackle the problem of sanitation in the developing world. We called it there invent the Toilet Challenge. This week in Seattle, the foundation is holding a Reinvent the Toilet Fair, where we have brought together about 200 grantees, partners, and others who are passionate about creating safe, effective, and inexpensive sanitation services for people without access to flush toilets.

The fair brought together people from a wide range of disciplines—inventors, designers, investors, advocates, academics, and government officials—all thinking about innovative ways to solve this long-standing problem. While at the fair, I awarded prizes to three universities we challenged a year ago to come up with solutions for capturing and processing human waste and transforming it into useful resources. The winners included: first place to California Institute of Technology in the United States for designing a solar-powered toilet that generates hydrogen and electricity, second place to Loughborough University in the United Kingdom for a toilet that produces biological charcoal, minerals, and clean water, and third place to University of Toronto in Canada for a toilet that sanitizes feces and urine and recovers resources and clean water. A special recognition was awarded to Eawag (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology) and EOOS for their outstanding design of a toilet user-interface.

Toilets are extremely important for public health, and – when you think of it – even human dignity. For most of us living in the developed world, we often don’t give them much thought.

In 2009, during a trip to South Africa I met with a health expert working to improve access to sanitation for the poor people of Durban. Most of the poor people in Durban (and elsewhere) are denied the convenience and health benefits of flush toilets because they don’t have access to water.

The flush toilets we use in the wealthy world are irrelevant, impractical and impossible for 40 percent of the global population, because they often don’t have access to water, and sewers, electricity, and sewage treatment systems. Worldwide, there are 2.5 billion people without access to safe sanitation—including 1 billion people who still defecate out in the open and more than 1 billion others who must use pit latrines.

Beyond a question of human dignity, this lack of access also endangers people’s lives, creates an economic and a health burden for poor communities, and hurts the environment.

Food and water tainted with fecal matter causes diarrheal diseases that kill 1.5 million children every year - more than the annual deaths from AIDS and malaria combined . . . .

Full story on the gates notes: http://www.thegatesnotes.com

Peter’s Comment

What a marvel Bill Gates has been for the world.

He has certainly had his critics over the years, but I really wonder about that. It has even been said that he has only turned to charity to ease his conscience about the way he has conducted his business affairs.

I prefer to think that here was a young man who had a vision and a plan to do some good in parts of the world that were almost beyond help, and that Microsoft was simply a means to that end.

Whatever the plan, there is certainly good work waiting to be done in many parts of the world.

In 1994 while traveling overland from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean via China and Pakistan I saw public toilets in remote areas that one located by searching the horizon for the largest swarm of blowflies. In Pakistan we ate in a restaurant high in the Karakoram Range where a stream flowed through the restaurant carrying everything imaginable from higher up in the village.

You’re on to it, Bill.