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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.
I'm just curious how someone will find a way to spin this as a bad thing. Will it be "Gates will probably insist they use only Windows toilets!"? Or maybe it will be "This is just a ploy for him to sell more Windows copies to the poor people after they take a shit!" Or perhaps "I'll be he'll ban Linux and Apple from these shithouses!"
Come on, I know there are plenty of Slashdotters just ACHING to find SOME way, ANY way to bash him some more. Forget that Steve Jobs does NO charitable activities (Steve don't do charity) or that this has nothing to do with Linux. Someone will find a way. He's the guy with the Borg picture, after all.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
but I think we can all agree it's a damn good one.
The last comment in the story about BSoDs is disappointing. I like to poke fun at Windows and Microsoft software in general as much as the next person over but I have genuine respect for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They're doing more to solve world problems than most countries are. I can recognize a good thing when I see it and making BSoD jokes when it comes to the foundation just belittles the work they do.
We all might make fun of gates but he's putting money into something that is worth while and often over looked. Having a safe place to poo is a pretty big deal, as it stands now a lot of places that don't end up draining into rivers and other water sources and making people sick.
With Vista?
It still will be a BSOD, the Brown Screen Of Death.
It is called humor dammit, even though it may be shitty humor.
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Blue Screen of Death will be replaced by Blue Splash of Death, probably chemical.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Say what you want about Microsoft, but that's no longer the same thing as Bill Gates. I've been a /. user for around a decade and have certainly made my share of bad Bill Gates jokes, but the guy is literally trying to save the world now. He has the money and the connections to do it, and the projects he's working on are incredibly selfless. Let's give him a break. OP was being very immature IMHO.
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.
Why re-invent the wheel, just make it low cost and difficult to block up..
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Hi my name is TeePee, think of me as your potty assistant! It looks like you're trying to go #2...
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.
By not crapping in their drinking water they might actually have a source of clean water. A proper outhouse might go quite far in accomplishing this.
I do wonder why something like the basic outhouse won't work. You dig a hole, put a tank* in, built the structure around it. When it gets full either have a truck come and empty it or build a new one. Also when planning an outhouse the best place for it is down stream from your water supply and usually 100' (30 meters) from the well. This way even if the tank leaks it won't contaminate your water supply since it is down stream and a way from it as the dirt acts as a filter.
* The tank can be pretty much made of anything, like an old metal barrel, old plastic barrel, concrete, special formed plastic tank. I have seen all of these used for outhouses.
Time to offend someone
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What do they do with the waste, as far as I can tell they use it for compost, but using human waste as compost for edible products, or even being in contact with it can lead to several diseases
I lived in Africa, and built outhouses. We dug a deep hole. Then, we made a shallow square hole, about 6 inches deep, in the soft pile of dirt. We placed a bucket on the ground inside the square, poured cement (and rebar) around the bucket, and when the cement dried we removed the bucket and had a floor with a hole in it. We put the floor with the hole over the hole we'd dug. Then we required people to sign a EULA agreement that by peeing in the outhouse, they agreed not to copy our idea. Wait, no we didn't. Kidding aside, I don't see that water has ever been part of the toilet equation in the developing world.
Gently reply
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Incorrect handling of human waste can indeed spread disease. But with proper composting, you can kill 100% of the pathogens and have no risk of spreading disease at all: http://weblife.org/humanure/
In some locations, it's not QUITE that simple. As for contaminating the drinking water...heh...a composting system can actually fill the bill without needing a classic outhouse, fill the same role, and do it for decades while being able to be placed in locations that would be otherwise impossible for an outhouse.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Also, this project is a much more noble cause than Gates' misguided drive to immunize the world's population. The world's health care systems would collapse unded the weight of all the new cases of Autism if successful.
I may be dense, but I sure hope that's sarcasm. Autism has no relation to vaccination.
The article spurring that whole belief has been outed as a fabrication. Andrew Wakefield was attempting to push single-disease vaccination shots as a means of boosting pharmaceutical profits, so his "study" showed that only multi-disease vaccinations caused autism. I know it's Wikipedia, but check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy for a brief overview. Note the many citations to non-Wikipedia sources such as BMJ and the CDC.
Someone please tell me this was a Whooooosh moment and I missed the joke.
I'm not quite sure what this problem looks like in your imagination, but the fact is, we're approaching the stage where most of the world's population live in cities.
Population density without the infrastructure to remove the waste is the problem. It's a very hard logistics problem.
You can't just dig a hole 30m down the road in an urban environment.
Also, "planning an outhouse", yes that's another problem since lack of infrastructure, poverty, filth and improvised shelter, ie slums, are all part of the mix.
Lots of perfectly functional, albeit hippyish solutions like composting toilets do not scale to urban environments.
Not only did i read the summary but I read the FA as well. they are trying to apply technology that will not be fricking used for a problem that a solution was discovered several thousand years ago.
You dont crap where you drink and eat. A proper outhouse is the solution. they talk about children playing in sewage, that is because these people are just crapping randomly or in open pits. where a proper outhouse IS the answer.
Blowing money to find a solution that has existed forever is dumb.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The summary specifically mentions urban areas. Downstream of your water supply probably isn't downstream of your neighbour's in a city. So you need some innovation to make sure it doesn't leak. Just digging a hole and covering it up when it's full isn't sustainable in a city. You need some way of getting the waste outside city limits where there's more space for storage or to a central location for treatment. Either of those solutions could use some development to make a system that's efficient and reasonably priced.
The funny part is that history already has those answers to draw upon. with minor changes that can easily be done you can upgrade what we used to do in cities before the flush toilet existed.
Look at london, NYC, etc... a lot of the world had large cities without plumbing and sewage answers for a very long time.
But there are no answers for dense populations without having a way of sewage removal, unless they invent the portable black hole and give them away for free to everyone.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I am impressed he's found something else to do good with.
But I suggest he look at what Nepal did:
He could fix the sanitation issue and solve a large part of their energy issues very cheaply. He just needs to push some startup money to modify the designs for the different areas and some startup money for a micro-finance so people will be able to buy them.
Here is an article on how nepal did it:
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/gobar-gas.htm
I'd recommend you read up on his foundation. One of their largest focuses is education. He's given to plenty of other state-side causes, such as the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (largest gift the CFF has ever received, no less).
Reality: money is good at quickly fixing infrastructure issues. It's far less efficient at fixing behavioral issues. I think it's a given that much of the US's problem are behavior based: racial bias, drug dependency, broken homes, and more (and often many of these causes).
It's a matter of impact. Where can his (or yours, or mine) money make an impact? I think Bill thinks beyond "his backyard", as I think is a far more enlightened approach. "How can I best help humanity today?" rather than "'Mericans first!"
I have no doubt that he will tackle domestic issues as well. After all, he's pledged to give away half of his income. That's an undertaking. Our problems will require significant planning - they aren't issues you just write a check for. For now, he's tackling the low hanging fruit.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
You're over thinking the problem. The bashing will be real toilet humor, heh. Something about them being full of shit, or about what floats, or you can't keep a good gates flushed down.
That's far easier than sinking a joke about windows or getting potty mouthed. But, fighting the urge is just pissing in the wind. When mother nature calls with a joke, Just go with it and let it flow.
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week folks!
I8-D
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.
But there is a difference between not having a degree in biology or waste management and living under the control of people that tell you to pray for rain in a massive drought. Or who believe raping a baby (or any virgin but easiest with a baby) cures aids. Or eat albino people to gain their powers. And don't act so high and mighty, it wasn't so long ago in the west we burned people alive for voodoo, oops witchcraft or killed people for their faith and made lampshades out of them.
Civilization, you never truly appreciate it until every last bit of it has been stripped away from you. There are still houses in western Europe where you can see the design for crapping out on to the street. The London sewer system isn't all that old (compared to civilized man capable of building a toilet) but us modern humans still rely on it because we are no longer capable of the massive engineering it took to build it to upgrade it to modern needs.
A hole in the ground that is all? What about leach area, the radius around the hole in which you shouldn't dig or grow crops etc? How do you know? For thousands of year NO human knew. We thought smell kept evil spirits away. You and I can drink purest water from the tap for less then the cost of a peanut but drink instead poisoned water from plastic bottles at outrages prices and waste most of it for flushing the toilet.
I sit here within easy reach of enough food to last me a week, pure water how ever much I want, power for a dozen gadgets, in building that doesn't even budge in the worsed storms. Maybe you are too, but I don't pretend that my state in the norm in the rest of the world. Am I grateful for it? Hell no, I am a spoiled westerner but at least sometimes a story like this reminds me there are other places in the world. Maybe you should too. Even knowledge we consider basic is not universal. Just because you had over a decade maybe even two of education doesn't mean everyone has.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If the toilet was nicknamed the crapper due to the invetor
do we now go to the bathroom and take a giant gates?
Very similar to Maimonides Eight levels of Charity. From highest to lowest:
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
does no one recall the Microsoft iLoo disaster in the UK?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.