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Bill Gates Endorses Water From Human Waste
theodp writes: GeekWire reports that Bill gates is certainly leading by example, appearing in a video in which he sips "a glass of delicious drinking water" produced from human waste processed by Janicki Bioenergy's OmniProcessor, which can take sewer sludge and turn it into clean drinking water, electricity and clean ash. So how was it? "The water tasted as good as any I've had out of a bottle," said Bill. "And having studied the engineering behind it, I would happily drink it every day. It's that safe."
Actually the majority of water has never been drunk by a human before. But almost all of it would have been drunk by a dinosaur at some point. Include every species ever and yes it's pretty much been piss at some point.
Where do people think their water comes from? Dependent on your location it is either pulled from a dam / river / ocean which has shit, corpses (animal and human), bacteria and all sorts of nasties or it comes from a waste water treatment plant after the solid waste has been removed.
The process is the same, ram the water under pressure against a membrane. Water goes through, other stuff doesn't. The biggest challenge is actually the medication that goes into the waste water system. It generally means that the solid waste that is removed by your treatment plant can't be used directly without additional treatment.
Why would anyone want to turn waste into drinking water and electricity?
Because a shocking number of people, at least 2 billion, use latrines that aren't properly drained. Others simply defecate out in the open. The waste contaminates drinking water for millions of people, with horrific consequences: Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically.
If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.
Western toilets aren't the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn't feasible in many poor countries.
One idea is to reinvent the toilet, which I've written about before.
Another idea is to reinvent the sewage treatment plant.
Today, in many places without modern sewage systems, truckers take the waste from latrines and dump it into the nearest river or the ocean --- or at a treatment facility that doesn't actually treat the sewage. Either way, it often ends up in the water supply. If they took it to the Omniprocessor instead, it would be burned safely. The machine runs at such a high temperature (1000 degrees Celsius) that there's no nasty smell; in fact it meets all the emissions standards set by the U.S. government.
Before we even started the tour, I had a question: Don't modern sewage plants already incinerate waste? I learned that some just turn the waste into solids that are stored in the desert. Others burn it using diesel or some other fuel that they buy. That means they use a lot of energy, which makes them impractical in most poor countries.
The Omniprocessor solves that problem. Through the ingenious use of a steam engine, it produces more than enough energy to burn the next batch of waste. In other words, it powers itself, with electricity to spare. The next-generation processor, more advanced than the one I saw, will handle waste from 100,000 people, producing up to 86,000 liters of potable water a day and a net 250 kw of electricity.
From Poop To Potable: This Ingenious Machine Turns Feces Into Drinking Water
Maybe if you are talking about each individual water molecule. But if you take any given glass of water, it no doubt contains water molecules that were part of Napoleon's piss.
There are more water molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the ocean.
Human waste contains heaps of harmful bacteria.
Poo? Yes. Piss? No.
Your kidneys filter at the molecular level and thus are VERY good at preventing bacteria from entering your bladder. If bacteria ever entered your bladder, you'd routinely have bladder and/or urinary tract infections, namely because no blood flows to those regions so you have no T cells to combat it. While urine smells foul and probably tastes worse, it wouldn't kill you to drink it. (But still don't do it anyways because it contains waste materials that your kidneys removed from your blood for a very good reason.)
That said, we also have the artificial means of doing the filtering job that kidneys do, so it wouldn't surprise me if this technique also worked on poo.
If I am going to drink water recycled in this manner, I'd prefer to have the engineering studied by an independant water quality professional, say, an environmental engineer? And for the output water to be studied by health professionals and microbiologists.
Bill Gates didn't invent it, and he isn't trying to sell it to you either. Chances are you'll probably never even see one unless either you're a humanitarian aide worker and/or you live in a third world country. He's trying to promote it as a means of helping people who have difficulty accessing potable water.
that's an understatement, there are more molecules of water in a glass of water ( 2 * 10 ^ 25) than there are estimated stars in the visible universe (10 ^ 24).