WATERLESS TOILET by Bill Gates

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has reinvented the toilet – a WATERLESS TOILET. In addition to not needing water, their invention allows waste to be converted into fertilizer.

Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist who founded Microsoft, revealed one of the projects he has been working on at his foundation: the reinvented toilet. This toilet requires no water or sewage, and uses chemicals to convert human waste into fertilizer.

“More than half of the world’s population does not have the safe sanitation they need to live a healthy and productive life,” Gates said in launching his invention.

Gates’ mission and that of his charitable foundation is to improve sanitation for countries that do not have or cannot afford to build the sewage infrastructure to dispose of waste.

To emphasize the importance of safe sanitation, Gates brought along a jar of feces during his speech. “This small amount of feces could contain up to 200 billion cells of rotavirus, 20 billion Shigella bacteria and 100,000 eggs of parasitic worms,” he said.

A global public health problem

Poor sanitation kills nearly 500,000 children under five annually and costs approximately $223 billion a year in increased health costs and lost productivity and wages, according to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Untreated wastewater can also negatively affect the environment. “Some of the untreated human waste is found in unlined pit latrines that contaminate the groundwater around people’s homes,” Gates said in his speech.

“Others are collected by hand, or in trucks, and dumped into nearby fields or bodies of water. And some are collected in sewers but never treated,” he added.

According to Gates, “we are far from the goal the world set for 2015 of having everyone use a safely managed toilet. As a measure to advance waste sanitation and water protection, the Gates and his wife’s foundation has created a toilet that can be used without the need for water or drainage.

Several of these “reinvented toilets” have been put to the test in Durban, South Africa. This is a good place to test because the city is growing rapidly and many people do not have modern sanitation, which means that even if they have access to a toilet, waste can get into the environment and cause disease, Gates said.

He said that while a typical toilet needs water, many of the new approaches to sanitation do not require water at all, and some are solar-powered instead of electricity.