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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."
I mean the guy already excelled at selling SHIT to people for years...
Water's water - given the diffusion time we're probably all drinking King Tut's piss today (not to mention plenty of other peoples/animals).
Bear Grylls could not be reached for comment.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
http://www.dilbert.com/2012-11...
Fish poop in it.
(attr: William Claude Dukenfield)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Remember, that delicious tap water was once pooped in by a dinosaur.
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
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.
They shouldn't. Modern clean water treatment plants with effective odour control tanks and sludge processing techniques should really have much of a scent.
Even WWTP are reasonable clean smelling these days.
Yes, it creates electricity, water, and activated sludge... What heats the sludge? Do they start an oil based fire, and then use off-gassing from the sludge to continue the reaction?
This is a great development in a field that will likely save billions of lives. But do they really need to portray it as "produced from human waste", rather than "filtered out of sewage"? The former makes me imagine some sort of artificial process that involves bleaching poop until it's transparent then bottling it.
"The water tasted as good as any I've had out of a bottle,"
That's a pretty low bar, as anyone accustomed to drinking fresh mountain spring water can tell you. I suppose it frequently tastes a better than metropolitan city water though...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
From BG blog one can conclude that the author belongs to the category of people unclear about the difference between a quantity of energy and a rate of energy production. To his excuse the common poor choice of kWh instead of the SI J (Joule J, 1 kWh = 3.6 MJ) as energy unit is just making energy discussions more confusing.
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
Did anyone really think Bill Gates would have the opinion "We can never drink water molecules that used to have poop next to them. That's just gross."
People can be skeptical whether a particular water purification process is adequate, but anyone who thinks water can't be purified is just an idiot and probably also homophobic (i.e. the category of people who are compelled to irrationality regarding things that seem gross to them).
Say what you want about Bill Gates, but he doesn't seem like the type to be idiotically irrational.
There is a large setup in South East Queensland.
Waste water from the gold coast and Brisbane is fed to two Advanced Water Treatment Plants at Beenleigh and then it is piped to a larger plant at Bundamba before being put into Wivenhoe dam. Wivenhoe is the primary drinking water storage for Brisbane.
That said it was all built in the mid 2000s when it looked like we were going to completely run out of water. They also built a large desal plant at Tugan. None of these systems are currently turned on as it then started to rain lots to the point we got seriously flooded in 2010.
With that, Gates opened himself up for Windows jokes wider than goatse
Table-ized A.I.
The meat from the store didn't used to be cut up so secretly when I was a kid. Sure they kept the carcasses back in the freezer but they'd bring out large parts to custom carve cuts for the shoppers. So you now it's fresh that way. Not too long ago I walked into a small grocery store and you could smell the meat immediately upon walking in which told me it wasn't fresh.
I guess I expect more intellegence from slashdot readers, it used to be that way any way.
Comments about "Gates selling shit" and "its faked" do nothing except show that you are ignorant and childish. What comes out of that unit is both distilled and then filtered (probably some sort of reverse osmosis filter that could do an ok job of cleaning the water on its own.) Since it is distilled there is no bacteria in it unless it it has been recontaminated further down the line.
The whole point of this is that there are plenty of places in the world with not much in the line of clean drinkable water. People live in those places. Poor people living in poor countries that can't afford (or chose not to) provide clean drinking water to thier people. Those peoples health and well being would be greatly improved by having safe clean water available. Their lifestyle and economic well being would be greatly improved if that water was available somewhere close to where they live.
Here is a solution that will take something that is found in abundance everywhere humans and their animals live and turn it in to something that is needed and desired enough that a person may be able to make a living running the thing. It is a solution that a small company (or village) could afford, as opposed to something costing tens of millions of dollars.
Here is a link to the web site of a small town in the US that just spent $21 million on a treatment plant plus another 30 million on sewage lines:
https://www.gocolumbiamo.com/P...
How many little third world villages do you suppose can raise $51 million?
Way to go Mr Gates!
Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward - T. Edison
like most things once it's a large scale business somebody is going to look to cut corners. You don't do it directly. You just cut everybody's budgets until it happens "out of sight, out of mind". Heck, you don't even need to cut their budgets, just don't _raise_ them and wait for inflation to do it for you. At 2-5% every year that's a nice profit margin increase.
So you don't check/change the filtration equipment as much anymore. Your guys are working 16 hour shifts for 20% less than minimum wage 5 years ago thanks to inflation and driving them to work more hours. Suddenly stuff gets into the water that shouldn't. Maybe a few people get sick, maybe a few over 50 die....
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