Bill Gates Wants To Reinvent the Toilet 338
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by
Soulskill
from the flush-with-ideas dept.
from the flush-with-ideas dept.
redletterdave writes "Bill Gates, the man responsible for bringing software to the masses with Microsoft and Windows, has plans to reinvent and popularize another industry: Sanitation. Gates, whose philanthropic efforts have helped bring clean water and resources to developing countries via the foundation created by he and his wife Melinda, said at the 'Reinvent The Toilet Fair' in Seattle on Wednesday that he plans to build a toilet that's better suited to developing countries in an effort to cut down on disease and death in those regions. 'Inventing new toilets is one of the most important things we can do to reduce child deaths and disease and improve people's lives,' Gates said. 'It is also something that can help wealthier countries conserve fresh water for other important purposes besides flushing.'"
Science Insider has some information on the winning designs from this year.
Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are already a multitude of solutions available, eg. bio-friendly bags that turn poop into fertilizer and just need you dig a hole. Seems to me that if he really want to reduce disease and improve lives he should aim to develop soap which doesn't require water. or something.
Good for Bill. And: read "The Big Necessity." (Score:5, Interesting)
This is great and I applaud and respect him for doing this. After you get done cracking jokes, go read The Big Necessity by Rose George. I never fully understood just how privileged we are.
"2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. I don't mean that they have no toilet in their house and must use a public one with queues and fees. Or that they have an outhouse, or a rickety shack that empties into a filthy drain or pigsty. All that counts as sanitation, though not a safe variety. The people who have those are the fortunate ones. Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. Instead, they defecate by train tracks and in forests. They do it in plastic bags and fling them through the air in narrow slum alleyways.... Four in ten people live in situations where they are surrounded by human excrement because it is in the bushes outside the village or in the city yards, left by children outside the backdoor...
In 2007, readers of the British Medical Journal were asked to vote for the biggest medical milestone of the last two hundred years. Their choice was wide: antibiotics, penicillin, anesthesia, The Pill. They chose sanitation."
Kudos to Bill... (Score:4, Interesting)
2.5 billion people live without the "minimum necessary" sanitation services. Access to safe, clean and effective human urine and feces disposal facilities is the most basic definition of sanitation. Improvements sanitation and hygiene has demonstrated positive effects on health. Unfortunately, many people are denied access to sanitation technology and/or infrastructure and thus lack the means of disposing of their waste. The challenge scales with population and can reach critical mass of non-functionality in areas of high population density in developing countries.
There is no single solution. The answer to the challenge requires management of fresh water and access to sanitation technology that mitigates today's risks while scaling with a determined uplift of infrastructure. This kind of massive-scale civil and social architecture requires great resources (fiscal, intellectual, and moral) directed in a continual and strategic ways. I believe Bill, Warren, and others are well positioned to drive success in this area...
"Green" toilets sometimes have problems... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's hope he does something better than the Stockholm "green" toilets they tried in Mongolia:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/07/toilet-tuesday-death-worlds-largest-eco-toilet/2783/ [theatlanticcities.com]
http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/5068-Eco-toilet-scheme-ends-in-failure [chinadialogue.net]
Not Microsoft's first forray into toilets (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo [wikipedia.org]
They censored my comment (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought my comment was perfectly reasonable. Here it is
Gates said :- "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."
Why does a flush toilet need electricity? Mine doesn't; moreover, although I live in a wealthy rural part of the UK I have no main sewer connection. The toilet flushes to my own septic tank where the stuff decomposes - it is little more than a masonery tank set below the ground and looks after itself apart from my getting the solids pumped out once a year. It isn't rocket science.
It uses water, but doesn't most of the World's population live near water? Far more than 60% I'd wager. It does not need to be drinkable. Yes, there are regions that do not, but we have plenty of it in the UK, so no thanks Gates, this "wealthier country" does not need to your stinking toilets to conserve water. Take your concerns elsewhere.
Re:Reason: (Score:5, Interesting)
I was hoping we would quit cutting down trees and use more water to clean our behinds (water is renewable you know)
I have heard that trees might alse be renewable. Infact, I believe that cleaning water is harder than growing trees. Although I do agree that reduction in trees is definitely not a good thing.
Re:Reason: (Score:4, Interesting)
Massive deforestation is indeed a problem, but trees can be harvested in a sustainable way.
Jokes aside.... (Score:4, Interesting)