Gates-backed tech fair reinvents the toilet
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WHO would have expected a toilet to one day filter water, charge a cellphone or create charcoal to combat climate change?
These are lofty ambitions beyond what most of the world’s 2.5 billion people with no access to modern sanitation would expect. Yet, scientists and toilet innovators around the world say these are exactly the sort of goals needed to improve global public health amid challenges such as poverty, water scarcity and urban growth.
Scientists who accepted the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s challenge to reinvent the toilet showcased their inventions in New Delhi on Saturday. The primary goal: to sanitize waste, use minimal water or electricity, and produce a usable product at low cost. The World Bank estimates the annual global cost of poor sanitation at US$260 billion, including loss of life, missed work, medical bills and other related factors. India alone accounts for US$54 billion — more than the entire GDP of Kenya or Costa Rica.
“In the West, such things are a nuisance, but people don’t lose their lives,” said Christopher Elias, president of global development at the Gates Foundation. “People don’t immediately realize the damage done by infections coming from human waste.”
Scientists said, the designs being exhibited at Toilet Fair had to go beyond treating urine and feces as undesirable waste, and recognize them as profit-generating resources for electricity, fertilizer or fuel.
The designs are mostly funded by Gates Foundation grants and in various stages of development. Some toilets collapsed neatly for easy portability into music festivals, disaster zones or illegal slums. One emptied into pits populated by waste-munching cockroaches and worms. One Washington-based company, Janicki Industries, designed a power plant that could feed off the waste from a small city to produce 150 kilowatts of electricity, enough to power thousands of homes.
The University of the West of England, Bristol, showcased a urine-powered fuel cell to charge cellphones overnight.
Another team from the University of Colorado, Boulder, brought a system concentrating solar power through fiber optic cables to heat waste to about 300 degrees Celsius. Aside from killing pathogens, the process creates a charcoal-like product called biochar useful as cooking fuel or fertilizer.
“Biochar is an important subject for scientists at the moment, since it can be used to sequester carbon in the soil for 1,000 years or more,” said Karl Linden, professor of environmental engineering in Boulder.
Beijing Sunnybreeze Technologies Inc also brought a solar-biochar system, but with the solar panels heating air that will dry sludgy human waste into nuggets that are then heated further under low-oxygen conditions to create biochar.
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