For Bill
Gates, toilets are serious business. The billionaire philanthropist kicked off
the Reinvented Toilet Expo in China and unveiled a new toilet that does not
require water or sewers, and uses chemicals to turn human waste into
fertilizer, Reuters reported.
“We are all
here for one reason: because more than half the world’s population doesn’t have
the safe sanitation they need to lead healthy and productive lives,” Gates said
in a speech on Tuesday in Beijing.
Gates
tweeted a video Monday that described his and his foundation’s mission to
improve sanitation for countries that do not have or cannot afford to build the
sewer infrastructure to remove waste.
There are few things I love talking about more than toilets. pic.twitter.com/rQdY3ZiIpC— Bill Gates (@BillGates) November 5, 2018
To drive
home the importance of safe sanitation, Gates brought a jar of feces with him
during his keynote in Beijing.
“You might
guess what’s in this beaker—and you’d be right. Human feces. This small amount
of feces could contain as many as 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion
Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs,” the Microsoft co-founder
said.
He kept the
jar on the podium for nearly 10 minutes before removing it, the Associated
Press reported.
Poor
sanitation kills nearly 500,000 children under the age of five annually and
costs an estimated $223 billion a year in the form of higher health costs and
lost productivity and wages, Reuters reported, citing the information from the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The
untreated sewage can also negatively impact the surrounding environment.
“Some of the
untreated human waste is in unlined pit latrines that contaminates groundwater
around people’s homes,” Gates said in his speech. “Some is collected manually,
or by trucks, and is dumped into nearby fields or bodies of water. And some is
collected in sewers but never gets treated. The point is that we are far from
the goal the world set in 2015 of everyone using a safely-managed toilet.”
The aim of
the expo is to “launch a new category of innovative, decentralized sanitation
solutions that will benefit millions of people worldwide,” Gates said.
Several of
these “reinvented toilets” are currently being tested in Durban, South Africa.
“Durban is a
good place to run these tests because the city is growing fast and many people
there don’t have a modern sanitation, which means that, even if they have
access to a toilet, the waste can get into the environment and make people
sick,” Gates said in the video.
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“A typical
toilet needs water, but many of the new approaches don’t require any water at
all, some of them don’t need electricity either, others run on solar power,” he
added. “All of them remove the pathogens from the waste and, most importantly,
they don’t have to be connected to the sewer system.”
The next
step for the project is to pitch the concept to manufacturers, Gates told
Reuters. He estimated that the market for the toilets will be more than $6
billion by 2030.
These
“reinvented toilets” are powered by solar panels.@BillGates / Twitter
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