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Bill Gates Looks to Reinvent the Toilet
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the German government are working on a $10 million project to provide innovative sanitation facilities to 800,000 Kenyans over the next five years. From the article: "The goal is to find 'innovative solutions' for sanitation in poor urban areas. Gates says it's time to move on from the era of the classic toilet. He points out that, despite all the recent achievements, 40% of the world's population, or some 2.5 billion people, still lives without proper means of flushing away excrement. But just giving them Western-style toilets isn't possible because of the world's limited water resources." I wonder what the toilet version of The Blue Screen of Death is.
Last I checked most of the surface area of Earth is water. Why not flush toilets with saltwater when 38% of the population lives within 100km of an ocean? Tidal driven pumps could be used for energy efficiency and in desert areas, solar desalinization is a possible source of drinking and irrigation water.
While many of the comments so far are focussing on the issue of toilets, as does the summary, it's the whole sewage infrastructure that's the issue. In the African cities I've been to, large areas don't have proper underground sewers, and sewage is carried in stinking open gutters at the side of the road; having any kind of toilet doesn't help if it's flushing into those open sewers. TFA talks about supporting construction of pit latrines in slums that lack any form of sanitation, so it seems they are being quite practical about working with the existing infrastructure.
Oh no... it's the future.
I think he has finally went over to the nutter side. a flush toilet that wastes precious water is NOT the answer.
Did you even read the summary? He's not trying to give them flush toilets. He's aware that it wastes water. From the SECOND LINE of the summary: "The goal is to find 'innovative solutions' for sanitation in poor urban areas..." What do you think "innovative solutions" might mean? Could it possibly be something along the lines of "a way to deal with waste in a sanitary way that doesn't involve water"?
Yeah. Try reading at least the summary before you post.
Wrong.
"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again. "
- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
Coffee-driven development.
I've been to Ethiopia and the clean water issue was pretty much the biggest problem there. Their cities are the very definition of "ancient" I doubt there's any place on earth that's had humans living in large numbers for as long. Buildings are packed so close together there is hardly room for new ones, and the space between the buildings is filled with "homes" thrown together out of cinder blocks, Joshua tree timber and corrugated steel (this is where the middle class live.) Underneath all of this is the plumbing of the city... it's very... very... very old. When a water main brakes, a city truck comes with shovels and a replacement pipe. Ethiopians flock to the truck and grab shovels, dig out the pipe and replace it. The government dudes then hand them cash for their trouble. All the sewer pipes lead to the same place... the river. Where do they get water? You guessed it, the river. there is no simple solution to this system. There are millions of 100+ year old sewage pipes draining into that river. All the pipes are so old they likely all leak and exchange contents between themselves all the time. So even if you could get clean water to begin with it'd likely not be clean when it arrived. You can't dig up the old pipes because they all run under buildings literally older than Jesus in some cases and there are simply no utility records at all.
On top of every building thats owned by anyone with money is a water tank. They pay other companies to come and fill that tank dailly or weekly. Showering with this water would be too expensive so this is your drinking water and you shower in the tainted water and keep your mouth closed. Another problem is the way bathrooms are designed in Africa and the middle east. In every place I stayed there was a bathtub with no shower head. Instead they had a sprayer on a hose that was part of the tubs faucet that could hang up high if you wanted it. I was told this has something to do with the muslim religion or something, I dont really know. But this sort of setup is against code in the US. Why? Because you can lay the hose down into the tub. If you have the tube full of water, and wash yourself in it... now the water is dirty. If the hose is laying in the water it can now siphon the dirty water back into the water supply. Every single tub is like this.
The only thing that I saw that was really working there was bottled water. It was plentiful and it was cheap. I could get a liter of good bottled water for about 10 cents. That's still a lot for the poor there, but, with a little more effort it could be made even cheaper.
Despite all this, the fact of the mater was water born illness was so common they didn't even bother to treat it in most cases. They wait until it becomes a real health problem. We adopted our son there and when we got back our entire family were basically on antibiotics for a full year afterwards. The stuff is so easy to spread, especially when you have a child in diapers that you cure one familly member and a week later another gets sick... in the end the doctor got fed up and just put everyone, even our dog on antibiotics at the same time for 6 weeks strait and finally we were rid of it.