Gates Foundation Spent $200 Million Funding Toilet Research (bloomberg.com) 123
According to Bloomberg, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation "spent $200 million over seven years funding sanitation research, showcased some 20 novel toilet and sludge-processing designs that eliminate harmful pathogens and convert bodily waste into clean water and fertilizer." Gates told the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing on Tuesday that these technologies at the event "are the most significant advances in sanitation in nearly 200 years." From the report: Holding a beaker of human excreta that, Gates said, contained as many as 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs, the Microsoft Corp. co-founder explained to a 400-strong crowd that new approaches for sterilizing human waste may help end almost 500,000 infant deaths and save $233 billion annually in costs linked to diarrhea, cholera and other diseases caused by poor water, sanitation and hygiene. One approach from the California Institute of Technology that Gates said he finds "super interesting" integrates an electrochemical reactor to break down water and human waste into fertilizer and hydrogen, which can be stored in hydrogen fuel cells as energy.
The reinvented toilet market, which has attracted companies including Japan's LIXIL Group, could generate $6 billion a year worldwide by 2030, according to Gates. The initial demand for the reinvented toilet will be in places like schools, apartment buildings, and community bathroom facilities. As adoption of these multi-unit toilets increases, and costs decline, a new category of reinvented household toilets will become available, the Gates Foundation said.
The reinvented toilet market, which has attracted companies including Japan's LIXIL Group, could generate $6 billion a year worldwide by 2030, according to Gates. The initial demand for the reinvented toilet will be in places like schools, apartment buildings, and community bathroom facilities. As adoption of these multi-unit toilets increases, and costs decline, a new category of reinvented household toilets will become available, the Gates Foundation said.
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What does it sound like it means? You don't even have to RTFA, just read the summary. Many places lack appropriate sewage treatment infrastructure, if they have it at all, harming human and environmental health when sewage is released untreated. The expo showcased alternative sewage and sanitation technologies, including on-site treatment technologies.
> Holding a beaker of human excreta that, Gates said, contained as many as 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasiti
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Septic tanks require water, ground that perks properly, low population density, and fairly expensive periodic maintenance.
Your idea is stupid and will not work.
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Re: Advances??? (Score:1)
City dwellers have no concept about the real world. Without rural areas you would have no food and die
Re: Advances??? (Score:4, Informative)
Rural Americans have no concept of the real world.
City dwellers have no concept about the real world.
It turns out, you're both right.
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No, dumbass, the rural lifestyle in the US can't exist without the cities.
Nobody said that the land can't exist, or wouldn't still have a few people on it.
But they wouldn't have the same lifestyle. And they'd be using pit toilets for sure.
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What is your point?
Peasant life was so shitty they tried to flee into cities at the first opportunity and in many countries they still try.
Without agricultural machinery and chemicals farming seriously sucks, but either is impossible without cities. Rural landmass my arse.
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The outflow of a septic tank is still highly contaminated. Drinking water that is contaminated by that outflow would be hazourdous to drink.
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Never skimp on anything between you and the ground (Score:5, Insightful)
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Bad headline, this isn't "toilet" research, it's biotech.
Re: Never skimp on anything between you and the gr (Score:2)
Re:Respect it because the alternative is bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, so it turns out pretty much every noncommercial toilet in America is a joke. The seals fail. They just fail. The huge amount of waste that arises from *having toilets with sucky designs in almost every home in the country* is insane.
The fix is pretty simple: whenever a toilet shows up in a landfill or dumpster, bill the manufacturer.
We don't do that, so every producer has an incentive to make toilets crappy enough that they fail within a few years.
Uh, where exactly are you getting your data that confirms we're throwing away toilets every few years? My last house still had the avocado green and harvest gold toilets installed from the 70's (no, I'm not joking), and my current house still has the original hardware that's almost 20 years old. Yes, internal hardware like the flapper breaks down over time (more likely due to the chlorinated water attacking the rubber material), but you don't rip a toilet out of a house because the guts fail. Every toilet I've replaced has been due to something other than breakage (color, height, shape, water capacity, etc.)
Much like consumer electronics, fashion has put more hardware into landfills than function has.
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Reducing the amount of water used on toilet like that can make the toilet not operate correctly. Usually clog more often, as they are designed to create a siphon when a larger amount of water raises the back side water line. And then to continue the siphon long enough to get everything up and over. If that siphon gets things up and over without enough water to push it down you get a clog.
With the older models that use 8+ gallons a single brick wont affect much, but adding multiple, or doing it to one using
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I wish the west would invest more in toilets. 99.9% of them here are just basic flush models, not even heated seats. Why the hell are we still using toilet paper, it's such a waste of resources and doesn't even clean that well. If you got faeces on any other part of your body you wouldn't wipe it off with a paper tower and call it job done.
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Is that too much to ask? Just send the bill to Salesforce and Twitter.
San Francisco voters approved Measure C yesterday to tax Salesforce, Twitter, and every other business with more than $50 million in revenue in order to fund solutions to the homeless problem. The tax is .5% of gross revenue. The measure was promoted by the CEO of Salesforce but opposed by the CEO of Twitter.
The measure however might be challenged in court because it is a new tax and probably won't get 2/3rds of the vote, which is needed if a new tax is proposed by government officials. SInce Measure
Good Experience (Score:4, Funny)
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Good thing it was $200 million. RTFA.
The three seashells (Score:2)
Bill doesn't know how to use them. I can see how that would be confusing.
windows product line (Score:1)
and microsoft can probably leverage these findings for windows development.
Not where I live. (Score:2)
The initial demand for the reinvented toilet will be in places like schools, apartment buildings, and community bathroom facilities.
In the public schools, they'd be broken with a week.
BTW, what's a community bathroom facility? I know what each word means, but can't put them all together. Is it the shared bathroom like in locker rooms and dormitories?
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The weirdest thing I've ever seen in a UK phone box was something that looked like a spaceship but the even weirder part - and I know it sounds crazy - was that the inside was bigger than the outside.
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Think shanty town with no sewer or sanitation system.
Community bathroom facilities provide sanitation to these areas significantly lowering risks of outbreaks.
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In New York City, A Community Bathroom Facility is a Starbucks.
It's an unspoken social contract - you get to charge $4 for burnt coffee, we get to use your bathrooms (no purchase necessary).
My US city could use some help downtown... (Score:2, Insightful)
We have a few thousand homeless people with little or no access to a toilet, much less a shower. Local businesses complain about excreta at their doors, but then note that if there was a nearby public toilet it would just attract more homeless people. We are currently recovering from an outbreak of hepatitis A as a result of sanitation problems among the homeless and those nearby.
My city receives tourists from all over the world and it's sad that we're looking like a 3rd world country.
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Lowest unemployment in decades. Tell the useless fucks to get jobs and stop shitting everywhere. It's not brain surgery.
Re: My US city could use some help downtown... (Score:1)
Wow, another comment on a post about the homeless with zero empathy or self-awareness.
Do you really think the people publically defecating and sleeping outside are chosing their lifestyle out of laziness, instead of debilitating mental issues and a lack of resources?
Maybe if more people had empathy the problem could be addressed but too many people like you with the "fuck you, got mine" attitude.
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The real problem is that there are no mental asylums in California. The ACLU sued the state back in the 70s to have them shut down on the grounds that they were inhumane. Now they have no place to go...but they're free, just like the ACLU wanted.
And frankly there are a proportion of homeless who are not mentally ill but just have extreme views on personal freedom and are willing to make sacrifices you consider bizarre. None of them are drowning in debt or spend their lives staring World of Warcraft, ev
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Oh shit, you just reminded me I don't have enough for next month's rent and I owe something like 240K gold to the guild master.
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What? Reagan shut them down.
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Nope! That's a lie. The ACLU sued to have them shut down, and Reagan merely closed the doors on the now-empty facilities. Of course, that created the modern homeless problem, and the ACLU and its media friends pinned in on Reagan.
You see, the ACLU thought it was morally wrong to imprison people who had committed no crime. Which is what mental asylums did. As long as they could lift spoon to mouth to feed themselves, they were deemed fit to be released. They sued and won.
Re:My US city could use some help downtown... (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't have such problems. Their cities stay clean and attract investment.
Its a city police politics problem. Find out why the city police do not to enforce laws. Parking laws. Trash laws. Camping laws. Waste laws.
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Look to the states that enforce laws and rules about tent cities, RV parking and trash in the street.
If you have "tent cities" then you need to admit you've got some seriously fucked up policies if you're a developed nation.
They don't have such problems. Their cities stay clean and attract investment.
Its a city police politics problem. Find out why the city police do not to enforce laws. Parking laws. Trash laws. Camping laws. Waste laws.
Because there are two ways to police, with the good will of the people or with the fear of the people.
The latter is commonly called a police state where citizens fear breaking laws and talking to the police because punishments are severe and standards of evidence are low or non existent.
The former is how we police in developed nations where the spirit of the law is considered abo
It hurts (Score:3, Funny)
Must ... resist ... Windows ... quality ... jokes
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He's rich, he probably uses a Mac these days.
Shit is a real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
It's interesting to see this sort of research. Getting rid of people's shit is actually quite difficult to do in an efficient and sanitary way. It's also a difficult UX problem, because levels of care in excreting are substantially different across cultures.
For example, in poor areas the idea of sitting on a toilet seat is a completely alien idea. People either squat over holes in the ground or stand on the toilet bowl and squat. People will occasionally shit or pee all over the toilet, causing problems. Getting the shit/pee out of the bowl along with toilet paper etc is difficult. Then there's the odors/smell/leftover shit problem.
Plus toilets need cleaning...lots of cleaning. In fact, they're cleaned more often than any other area, generally speaking. And they're still filthy.
We haven't even gotten to the "moving the shit out of the toilet" part at that point.
Then of course there's the "what do you do with the combined shit and piss of 50,000 people."
So kudos for the Gates Foundation for doing something creative with their money. These sort of structural problems get worse as time goes on. People don't understand the sheer amounts of infrastructure it takes to deal with shit like this. Here's an example:
In NYC, there are about 3 million households. Each household has 2 toilets. Each toilet requires a holding tank of 6 or 13 gallons. So at any given time there are about 18-39 million gallons of water hanging around that had to be delivered to every household. Water pressure is generally 80psi, which means you need 80psi to 3m point locations across 302 square miles (784 sq km). That pressure doesn't just fill toilets, it supplies showers, sinks, washing machines, etc.
And that's just one municipal water supply. The sewer system is completely independent
It's surprising, to be honest, that universities or governments aren't looking at these sort of issues. I mean, there are all kinds of efficiencies that are possible. For example, why not use the water pipes for AC heat transfer?
Re:Shit is a real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Having been peripherally associated with some foreign development projects, it’s astounding how many people here completely don’t get that the real problem in many places isn’t getting clean water (though that’s a sexy and easy(er) problem to solve, but rather what to do with the waste at the other end of the problem.
I’ve supported a couple of charities that do their hardest to build safe, culturally appropriate latrines/privies. These are just as, if not more, critical than drilling wells etc...
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Why bother when there's a perfectly good street right there?
Re: Shit is a real problem (Score:2)
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Agreed, often solving the waste problem partially solves the water supply problem as well.
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Having been peripherally associated with some foreign development projects, itâ(TM)s astounding how many people here completely donâ(TM)t get that the real problem in many places isnâ(TM)t getting clean water (though thatâ(TM)s a sexy and easy(er) problem to solve, but rather what to do with the waste at the other end of the problem.
How is that a problem? Build bason toilet. Throw kitchen scraps into toilet when you shit. Every week or so, turn the crank to stir the shit. Within one year, remove nice, clean composted soil from the door at the back of the vault and use it anywhere you need soil.
Re: Shit is a real problem (Score:2)
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Governments are.
I work in this industry and plant & network optimisation for waste management is a major place of investment.
That said I live in a first world developed country and the challenges are different. It's pump stations and treatment capacity rather than getting any kind of system in place. The last 20 years has also seen the move towards megaplants and the decommissioning of smaller localised plants. The transfer costs of moving the raw effluent further are far out weighed by the efficienc
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The larger sites are both economically and environmentally better.
Yeah, right. Until a pump quits or a valve gets stuck open. Then it's thousands of gallons of sewage dumped into the lake. Meanwhile, all us people with septic tanks continue on with no problems.
The nearby city wants to extend sewer and water to our neighborhood. But for the people out here, that just means a $50,000 property assessment for the improvements plus the privilege of paying about $100 per month for something we get for free. And the chance of being able to watch our shit float by the dock occas
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If a low level system failure leads to raw effluent being released into the waterways your systems are horrifically designed. All the legacy systems around here that had that failure mode have been replaced. One project example is the BMP Alliance which was built to handle population growth and to remove the "failure to environment" state.
Septic also isn't without its problems. It dramatically increases the nutrient content in nearby waterways which causes all kinds of imbalances. This also assumes the
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>It's surprising, to be honest, that universities or governments aren't looking at these sort of issues.
s/surprising, to be honest,/false to claim/g # Claim is offered without evidence, and breathtakingly wrong / stupid.
Quick googling: there are 50k water engineers in the AWWA alone. Thousands more as civil engineers, public health practitioners, etc. They're looking at process efficiency, clean and waste water, water treatment, problematic wastewater elements like hazmat or cellulose waste, testing,
Our astronauts can use repressed water (Score:1)
Is their way that much more economical????
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Reverse Osmosis, the method used on the ISS, is high energy, & highly complex. It is perfect for that situation though and is the method that is used in large scale water treatment plants in the developed world.
For places with limited technical skills, unreliable power and limited supporting infrastructure it is not a good fit.
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thats kind of crappy (Score:1)
You know the old saying... (Score:2)
I'm currently working on software testing... I don't see any difference between that and toilet research! It's all just dealing with the shit other people have left behind.
Abby Rockefeller and Clivus Multrum (Score:1)