Gates lifts the lid on his glass toilet revolution to flush out diseases
MICROSOFT founder Bill Gates brandished a jar of human excrement during a speech in China yesterday as part of a plea for the safe disposal of human waste.
The billionaire philanthropist placed the jar on a pedestal to kick off a three-day “Reinvented Toilet” expo.
Mr Gates said: “This small amount of faeces could contain as many as 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs.
“I brought it to draw attention to a serious issue that kills more than 500,000 people every year: poor sanitation.”
Mr Gates argued that the global sanitation problem that costs an estimated €195.3bn a year, will “get worse if we don’t do something about it”.
He went on: “These apathogens cause diseases like diarrhoea,
cholera, and typhoid kill nearly 500,000 children under the age of five every year.”
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested over €175.2m over seven years to create a “pathogen-killing” toilet that breaks down human waste and kills germs. The new toilets leave behind clean water and solids that can be used as fertiliser, or disposed of safely outdoors without further treatment, Mr Gates claimed. The toilets operate without piped-in water, a sewer connection or outside electricity. Some of the current prototypes are solar powered, or generate their own energy mechanically.
Over 20 companies had signed up to the project. Mr Gates has also invested in a small-scale treatment plant that processes waste from pit latrines, septic tanks and sewers.
“I watched faeces go up the conveyor belt and drop into a large bin,” Mr Gates said in a blog post. “They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking
water.”