The loo that could save 500,000 kids
BILL Gates has unveiled a waterless toilet which could save nearly half a million children’s lives a year.
The Microsoft co-founder, 63, said the loo uses chemicals to safely treat human waste so it does not need to go to a sewage works and is ideal for use in arid areas with poor sanitation.
Gates revealed the design on stage at the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Bejing where he highlighted the issue by placing a jar of excrement on a pedestal next to him.
The billionaire, who has spent €172million on the project, said: “You might guess what’s in this beaker and you’d be right.
“Human faeces. This small amount of faeces could contain as many as 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs.”
Gates added such bacteria cause diseases which kill nearly 500,000 children under the age of five every year.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation say the problem costs €174billion a
SPEAKING AT EXPO IN BEIJING
The waterless toilet at the exhibition year in healthcare and lost income worldwide. Gates said: “The current toilet simply sends the waste away in the water, whereas these toilets don’t have the sewers. They take both the liquids and solids and do chemical work on it,”
Unlike other chemical toilets, the treated urine is safe enough for watering plants, cleaning and cooking. And the solid waste is taken to a thermoprocessing plant to be converted into energy and fertiliser.
He compared the change from traditional to waterless toilets as similar to development in computing at the time he co-founded Microsoft in the mid-1970s.
Gates, who is worth €85billion, said: “In the way a personal computer is self-contained, not gigantic, we can do this chemical processing at the household level.” He then joked: “I have to say, a decade ago, I never imagined I’d know so much about poop.”
More than 20 companies and academic institutions are exhibiting new toilet technologies at the expo.
I never thought I’d know so much about poop