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Bill Gates Wants To Reinvent the Toilet
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.
So we have something new for Windows 8 to go down.
he's spent all these years making crap.
can't wait to see for the BSOD on that.
plans to build a toilet that's better suited to developing countries
toilet starter edition...
I'm just going to wait for Apple's competing product. The toilet is a perfect example of an Apple product. It has one button, one function, and it needs to be clean and durable.
I'm sick and tired of all these Windows 8 ads on slashdot.
"Bill Gates, the man responsible for bringing software to the masses with Microsoft and Windows..."
Fucking hell, this is Slashdot, not Readers Digest.
Apparently genital mutilation wasn't preventing disease.
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.
Why do I feel like we've talked about this before?
Oh, yeah. Because we have.
Can you please design one that doesn't leave shit streaked all the way down the back when you take a dump? I thought a toilet was a toilet, until I saw all the kinds they have in Europe. You have to scrub every one of them down after a dump. The worst was one that had a flat shelf to dump on and the water would wash it off. Yeah, good luck getting that loaf to wash away. What the hell? Sorry for the shitty post, but this is the topic we were presented with.
I know the typical /. response is to either make a "Windows Sucks!" crack or to launch into some conspiracy theory about how this is part of some secret agenda to foist MS-brand proprietary toilets on the world. But I'm going to applaud his efforts instead.
But if you have to have a crack, here's one: This beats the crap out of anything Steve Jobs ever did for the third world.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
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."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Well, in this case, taking into account the water and sanitary needs of developing countries, this makes perfect sense.
Not everybody has the luxury of municipal water which takes such things away to be handled by Someone Else.
Doing it in a way that is portable, cheap to operate, doesn't require a massive infrastructure, and doesn't spread disease ... well, for a lot of people in the world, that would be a huge improvement.
From TFA:
So, really, what wheel are you insinuating is being reinvented here?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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...
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/
http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/5068-Eco-toilet-scheme-ends-in-failure
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Great way to spread disease too!
Without proper composting or another method of heating it to kill all the nasties using excrement as fertilizer just continues to current problem of spreading disease.
He's looking for somewhere to put Windows 8. Normal toilets that sufficed for previous versions of Windows just aren't capable of handling Metro. God help you if you run across one of these new toilets and don't know where to "Start".....
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
What will the licensing fee be, to use this new toilet?
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo
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Night soil, un-composed, is a health risk because pathogens are returned un-treated to the food production cycle. Composting it into "humanure" is a good way to regain the nutrient value in a local closed system while reducing artificial fertilization inputs.
Composting toilets exist, so I'm not really sure what role Gates would have, except maybe simplifying design and streamlining manufacturing and distribution so that they can become cheap and common in the areas of interest. Or else using some other technique besides composting for sanitization.... but that would require some kind of energy source to Pasteurize the waste. Hard to beat just letting composting microorganisms crank up the heat using just the nutrients in the waste.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
There are already a multitude of solutions available, eg. bio-friendly bags that turn poop into fertilizer and just need you dig a hole.
And the "multitude of solutions available" don't always work.
Here's a "lessons learned" article on the Daxing Ecological Community toilet experience; hope the Gates foundation is willling to learn from other peoples' failures: http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/5068-Eco-toilet-scheme-ends-in-failure
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I have a friend working on water quality in Saharan Africa. She sent me this picture which I find hilarious. However, it's true. There are parts of the world where there is barely enough water to drink, let alone crap in. I think it's a noble cause.
Also, this story is a dupe.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Unfortunately, many countries don't have such easy access to water or the plumbing infrastructure to deliver it to all of these people. I believe it was common in Brazilian slums to have about 4 gallons of water per person per day for all needs (cooking, cleaning, consuming). For contrast, in the US, it's between 100-150 gallons per person per day.
Your comment was not censored, it's on the article, and I'm glad to see you showing yourself here so that I can mock you.
He isn't pushing for a better design of toilet for the UK. He's pushing for a better design of toilet in the developing world.
And yes, your sanitation system does need electricity because your crap (including the stuff you're talking) goes to a waste treatment plant that depends on electrically driven machinery to operate. It doesn't just sit in your septic tank and decompose, by your own admission septic tanks have to be emptied at regular intervals by men in tanker lorries.
And a lot of people in the developing world don't live near water, so your randomly-generated 60% figure is irrelevant.
Now go back and read the article properly this time before posting further retarded comments and making a complete and utter dick of yourself.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
And I thought that's what the Windows 8 team was already doing!
Not the toilet, just it's intended contents.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Because he's not happy with the way shit's going.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Bill Gates has a lot of critics, myself included, but I think he deserves at least some credit for trying to improve the lives of the world's poorest people. Much of the famine and disease in Africa is caused by lack of water, both drinking and irrigation. It seems to me that if someone can come up with a waterless toilet it would be helpful. Perhaps the end product can be used to fertilize crops? Gates represents a new breed of philanthropists. The old way was to just write a big check to some charity and trust that they spend the money efficiently and in the way you want it spent. I have worked for non-profits and I can say that the ones I worked for were very inefficient...along the lines of government agencies (yes, I've worked for them too). They mean well and have noble causes but there is a lot of waste. Gates wants a direct hand in the money he donates so that it will get spent in the way he wants and the recipients will be made to show some progress. Frankly, I don't see a problem with that, given the vast amounts of money he has pledged. Some of the ideas will work and others will not but nobody will know unless they try.
A new toilet better suited for developing countries. Forget the fact that most of the per capita waste in the world happens right at home in N. America. But yeah, stick a "developing countries" label on it to make it go down better with the Politically Correct crowd.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.