Canada engineers develop toilet that operates without water
TORONTO : A team of engineers in Canada has devised a prototype that reimagines the humble toilet; with an innovative design that makes it suitable for areas that lack access to sanitation facilities such as adequate running water or sewage systems.
India, of course, is a large part of the team’s objective of creating a sustainable toilet. An earlier version was presented at Reinvent the Toilet Fair held in New Delhi in March 2014.
Almost three years later, an improved model arrived in India. As the team’s leader, professor Yu-Ling Cheng, director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Global Engineering, said, “We started in April in Coimbatore. It is not yet a commercialisable unit. We did the testing to learn about user behaviour.”
The concept behind the toilet is a household system that can operate without running water or a connection to plumbing or even
THE CONCEPT BEHIND THE TOILET IS A HOUSEHOLD SYSTEM THAT CAN OPERATE WITHOUT RUNNING WATER OR EVEN WITHOUT RELIABLE GRID POWER
without reliable grid power, using a combination of a hand-cranked mechanism, solar power and steam. The excreta is separated into liquid and solid waste
The solid waste goes into a smoulder chamber that incinerates waste and leaves only ashes, thereby destroying any germs and contaminants.
“It is not necessarily just for rural areas; it is also very suitable for urban areas. Many cities do not have the proper fecal sludge management systems in place, and our system would destroy the fecal sludge right at source, so there is no need for downstream management,” Cheng, who was born in Taiwan explained to HT