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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.
The real question is... will those toilets run Crysis?
but I think we can all agree it's a damn good one.
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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Hi my name is TeePee, think of me as your potty assistant! It looks like you're trying to go #2...
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.
"He doesnt know what the three sea shells are for!"
What about Composting sawdust toilet I'm sure the locals have something they can use in lieu of sawdust.
You could even create a dehydration toilet Urine is collected separate (where it could easily be evaporated off and the urea used as fertilizer). After dehydrated the human waste could take place of animal dung used for heat.
I think a bigger and better use of this money would be something to sanitize. Something as simple as soap or the 'waterless' alcohol based sanitizers.
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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.
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.
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