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Gates Foundation Spent $200 Million Funding Toilet Research (bloomberg.com)
According to Bloomberg, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation "spent $200 million over seven years funding sanitation research, showcased some 20 novel toilet and sludge-processing designs that eliminate harmful pathogens and convert bodily waste into clean water and fertilizer." Gates told the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing on Tuesday that these technologies at the event "are the most significant advances in sanitation in nearly 200 years." From the report: Holding a beaker of human excreta that, Gates said, contained as many as 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs, the Microsoft Corp. co-founder explained to a 400-strong crowd that new approaches for sterilizing human waste may help end almost 500,000 infant deaths and save $233 billion annually in costs linked to diarrhea, cholera and other diseases caused by poor water, sanitation and hygiene. One approach from the California Institute of Technology that Gates said he finds "super interesting" integrates an electrochemical reactor to break down water and human waste into fertilizer and hydrogen, which can be stored in hydrogen fuel cells as energy.
The reinvented toilet market, which has attracted companies including Japan's LIXIL Group, could generate $6 billion a year worldwide by 2030, according to Gates. The initial demand for the reinvented toilet will be in places like schools, apartment buildings, and community bathroom facilities. As adoption of these multi-unit toilets increases, and costs decline, a new category of reinvented household toilets will become available, the Gates Foundation said.
The reinvented toilet market, which has attracted companies including Japan's LIXIL Group, could generate $6 billion a year worldwide by 2030, according to Gates. The initial demand for the reinvented toilet will be in places like schools, apartment buildings, and community bathroom facilities. As adoption of these multi-unit toilets increases, and costs decline, a new category of reinvented household toilets will become available, the Gates Foundation said.
Gates told the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing on Tuesday that these technologies at the event "are the most significant advances in sanitation in nearly 200 years."
What does that even mean?
I was once advised by a mentor to 'never skimp on anything that gets between you and the ground'. He was talking about tires, shoes, and beds, but toilets certainly qualify. Every human poops, and many of the worst diseases still extant (cholera and friends) thrive in conditions of poor sanitation. So don't make fun of this research -- respect the throne! Invest in it!
Is that too much to ask? Just send the bill to Salesforce and Twitter.
I see Bill is putting his years of experience in developing shit products to good use.
Can't do crap these days with $20-million.
Bill doesn't know how to use them. I can see how that would be confusing.
and microsoft can probably leverage these findings for windows development.
Shit happens. Gotta make the most of it.
William(Bill) Henry Gates III is certainly putting to use his years as a parasitic piece of human excretia to use in ridding some members of the third world from their own self sustaining population of parasitic waste.
Now if only Zuckerberg will learn from his example and do the same.
The initial demand for the reinvented toilet will be in places like schools, apartment buildings, and community bathroom facilities.
In the public schools, they'd be broken with a week.
BTW, what's a community bathroom facility? I know what each word means, but can't put them all together. Is it the shared bathroom like in locker rooms and dormitories?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
and receive grants to advance the field of Toilet Science.
$200 millions down the toilet!
We have a few thousand homeless people with little or no access to a toilet, much less a shower. Local businesses complain about excreta at their doors, but then note that if there was a nearby public toilet it would just attract more homeless people. We are currently recovering from an outbreak of hepatitis A as a result of sanitation problems among the homeless and those nearby.
My city receives tourists from all over the world and it's sad that we're looking like a 3rd world country.
...omphaloskepsis often...
went right down the toilet.
Must ... resist ... Windows ... quality ... jokes
Table-ized A.I.
He should spend his money figuring out how to flush that turd of an OS called Windows 10.
It's interesting to see this sort of research. Getting rid of people's shit is actually quite difficult to do in an efficient and sanitary way. It's also a difficult UX problem, because levels of care in excreting are substantially different across cultures.
For example, in poor areas the idea of sitting on a toilet seat is a completely alien idea. People either squat over holes in the ground or stand on the toilet bowl and squat. People will occasionally shit or pee all over the toilet, causing problems. Getting the shit/pee out of the bowl along with toilet paper etc is difficult. Then there's the odors/smell/leftover shit problem.
Plus toilets need cleaning...lots of cleaning. In fact, they're cleaned more often than any other area, generally speaking. And they're still filthy.
We haven't even gotten to the "moving the shit out of the toilet" part at that point.
Then of course there's the "what do you do with the combined shit and piss of 50,000 people."
So kudos for the Gates Foundation for doing something creative with their money. These sort of structural problems get worse as time goes on. People don't understand the sheer amounts of infrastructure it takes to deal with shit like this. Here's an example:
In NYC, there are about 3 million households. Each household has 2 toilets. Each toilet requires a holding tank of 6 or 13 gallons. So at any given time there are about 18-39 million gallons of water hanging around that had to be delivered to every household. Water pressure is generally 80psi, which means you need 80psi to 3m point locations across 302 square miles (784 sq km). That pressure doesn't just fill toilets, it supplies showers, sinks, washing machines, etc.
And that's just one municipal water supply. The sewer system is completely independent
It's surprising, to be honest, that universities or governments aren't looking at these sort of issues. I mean, there are all kinds of efficiencies that are possible. For example, why not use the water pipes for AC heat transfer?
After Windows, Bill "innovated" another more hygienic toilet, what a genius, what a XP!?!
If waste water(cleaning, toilet) can already be processed to be consumable by our astronauts. Why did the gates have to invent/invest to find a new way of doing it.
Is their way that much more economical????
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
really sh1tty
Well done.. I came for that particular joke :-)
It'll be a darn sight lazier than trying to get you to stop being a bigot.
This is slashdot, FFS!
Technical journalism with a clue.
In the US you call them marts.
Bad headline, this isn't "toilet" research, it's biotech.
We don't want this Bill. Africa is already set for a population explosion over the next 30 years. If you solve the infant deaths, that means there's more people wanting to leave that shithole and where are they going to go but migrate into Europe. Leave the shithole alone and focus on domestic issues instead of creating international crisises in the name of naive philanthropy.
Yeah, so it turns out pretty much every noncommercial toilet in America is a joke. The seals fail. They just fail. The huge amount of waste that arises from *having toilets with sucky designs in almost every home in the country* is insane.
The fix is pretty simple: whenever a toilet shows up in a landfill or dumpster, bill the manufacturer.
We don't do that, so every producer has an incentive to make toilets crappy enough that they fail within a few years.
That's some expensive shit.
So we are getting the three sea shells toilet finally! (Demolition Man reference)
Get rid of abortion. Murdering babies because a VAST majority of women don't want to deal with the responsibility of choosing to have sex is wrong.
I wish the west would invest more in toilets. 99.9% of them here are just basic flush models, not even heated seats. Why the hell are we still using toilet paper, it's such a waste of resources and doesn't even clean that well. If you got faeces on any other part of your body you wouldn't wipe it off with a paper tower and call it job done.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
He's not really a bigot, just a Coporophile and possibly Coporophage in denial (assuming it's the same person as the one who posts on *nearly every thread* about 'shitty smelly hindu chimps').
At least you didn't go here.
Fantastic use of money to deal with something so overlooked by the bulk of the modern world
Absolutely. I am about to remodel a bathroom and wish I could install a toilet, even if is costs more, that produces drinkable/usable water and fertilizer for my garden.
As long as A) it doesn't break and need repairs frequently B) doesn't require components and other materials that wreck havoc on the environment to produce C) doesn't leak or have handle stuck issues like most toilets seem too and D) doesn't require some weekly/monthly filter replacement overhead etc. yearly is fine and in line with other things you must do yearly like replace filters on heat/cooling systems, inspect your septic (if you have one), winterize the house, clean the gutters, etc.
ironically, the catch phrase "no shit Sherlock" comes to mind for Mr. Gates. The more people, the more poop. The more poop, the more pooper scoopers. a beautiful cycle like water.. just keep it clean and let it flow. reminds me of an SNL episode called Colon Blow. ;-) good one for a Throwback Thursday.
Amen.
What a shitty way to spend money
"It's a shitty job, but _somebody_ has to do it!"
I'm currently working on software testing... I don't see any difference between that and toilet research! It's all just dealing with the shit other people have left behind.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
hire a servant to wash your ass for you, then they can use your electric washer and electric dryer to clean the cloth they used. Give them $.05 more an hour and I bet they'd look you over for any shit that may have gotten on other parts of your body as well.
Agreed, our rivers get dumped with half treated sewerage all the time, kills all the fish and I'm sure it causes other issues as well, if the toilet can take over the job of the treatment plants you don't have to build all the infrastructure that is needed currently. This is an awesome thing to invest in. My wife dragged me to a humanure course, and I am glad she did, current methods of turning human shit into fertilizer is time consuming and you need a lot of space to do it. Septic tanks are a pain, most toilet cleaners fuck with them, even ones that are marked as being septic tank friendly, at some point they have to drained, which is when the honey sucker truck is called in and they suck all the shit out. So yeah, advances of this sort will change a lot of people's lives.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
This news brings Abby Rockefeller to my memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... I just keep wondering if Bill Gates could have better invest his money in this company: http://www.clivusmultrum.com/