Bill Gates Drifts Towards Arrakis in Quest for New Toilet

Bill Gates wants to reinvent the toilet and he's putting the considerable heft of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation behind the effort -- plus German taxpayers are kicking in $10 million to a joint project. According to a report we picked up from Time, "Over the next five years, this project aims to provide 800,000 people in Kenya with access to sanitation facilities and ensure clean drinking water for 200,000.

"The goal is to find "innovative solutions" for sanitation in poor urban areas. Gates says it's time to move on from the era of the classic toilet. He points out that, despite all the recent achievements, 40% of the world's population, or some 2.5 billion people, still lives without proper means of flushing away excrement. But just giving them Western-style toilets isn't possible because of the world's limited water resources."

photo credit: Sand Dunes by David Stanley

Shades of Dune, don't you think? But there's more...

The engineer who heads the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene department at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Frank Rijsberman, is presently working on two projects. With one project, the foundation supports the construction of pit latrines in rural areas and slums without sanitation facilities. With the other, it supports research projects, giving grants to scientists who come up with new ideas for using human excrement. He says there have been experiments to turn excrement into a kind of microwave that can be used as a source of energy.

Isn't that wild?

He says there are biological bacteria that could turn waste into compost, which sounds kind of old school to us, but he also talks about the possibility of toilets actually turning urine into drinking water. In view of the world's limited water resources, both the Gates Foundation and German Development Policy support various projects for dry toilets that do not use water to flush and that separate excrement from urine in order to dry it.

Another method put forward by the Gates Foundation in South Africa is using the urine of 400,000 people to make nitrogenous fertilizer in powder form. A similar albeit high-tech variation is currently being tested by the Society for International Cooperation in Eschborn, Germany. The importance of this research is not always easy to explain, says Rijsberman, because anything having to do with human waste provokes a "yuck factor."

Necessity may be what ultimately overrides the yuck factor. As potable water supplies continue to dwindle relative to demand, we'll see how close we come to Frank Herbert's vision in Dune.

"The Fremen also have complex rituals and systems focusing on the value and conservation of water on their arid planet; they conserve the water distilled from their dead, consider spitting an honorable greeting, and value tears as the greatest gift one can give to the dead. The novel suggests that the Fremen have adapted to the environment physiologically, with their blood able to clot almost instantly to prevent water loss." [Dune (novel) on en.wikipedia]

see:
A Human-Waste Gold Mine: Bill Gates Looks to Reinvent the Toilet from Worldcrunch at www.time.com.