Flush with Success: Bill and Melinda Gates Reinvent the Toilet

Bill and Melinda Gates want everyone to have privy privileges. Last week, at the Third African Conference on Sanitation and Hygiene (AfricanSan3) in Rwanda, the Gates Foundation announced its lavatory competition.

The Reinventing the Toilet Challenge is just one small, but crucial, part of the Gates Foundation’s $42 million grant program aimed to improve sanitation in undeveloped areas, where about 1.5 million children die annually from diseases associated with the absence of safe and clean places to go to when nature calls.

To plumb academia for ideas, the Foundation’s Water, Sanitation & Hygiene program recently invited 22 universities to submit their concepts. Eight universities were then awarded grants to invent a waterless, hygienic toilet that is safe and affordable for people in the developing world and doesn’t have to be connected to a sewer.

The following are the ideas that will be developed.

• A toilet that produces biological charcoal, minerals, and clean water: Professor M. Sohail of Loughborough University in the UK and his team propose to develop a toilet to transform feces into a highly energetic combustible through a process combining hydrothermal carbonization of fecal sludge followed by combustion. The process will be powered by the heat generated during the combustion phase and will recover water and salt from feces and urine.
• Turning the toilet into an electricity generator for local use: Professor Georgios Stefanidis and his team at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands propose to develop a toilet system that will apply microwave technology to transform human waste into electricity. The waste will be gasified using plasma, which is created by microwaves in tailor-made equipment. This process will yield syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2). The syngas will then be fed to a solid oxide fuel cell stack for electricity generation. This toilet system will be able to serve single households or groups of households.
• A urine-diverting toilet that recovers clean water on-site : Professor Tove Larsen of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology and Dr. Harald Gründl of the industrial design company EOOS in Vienna propose to design and construct a functional model of a urine-diverting toilet that recovers water and is user-friendly, attractive, hygienic, and provides water for cleansing.
• A community bathroom block that mineralizes human waste and recovers clean water, nutrients, and energy : Professor Christopher Buckley and his team at the University of Kwazulu-Natal propose to design, prototype, and evaluate a toilet system that can safely dispose of pollutants and recover valuable materials such as water and carbon dioxide from urine in community bathroom blocks.
•  A community scale biochar production plant fed by human waste : Brian Von Herzen of the European Climate Foundation and Professor Reginald Mitchell of Stanford University in the United States propose to design, build, and test a self-contained system that pyrolyzes (decomposes organic material at high temperatures without oxygen) human waste into a type of biological charcoal (biochar) that is used for carbon capture and storage.
•  A toilet that uses mechanical dehydration and smoldering of feces to recover resources and energy: Professor Yu-Ling Cheng and her team from the University of Toronto Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry propose to develop a technology for treating solid waste streams through mechanical dehydration and smoldering that will sanitize feces within 24 hours. They also intend to develop a method for sanitizing urine through membrane filtration and ultra-violet disinfection.
• A solar-powered toilet that generates hydrogen and electricity for local use: Professor Michael Hoffman (News - Alert) of the California Institute of Technology proposes to design a self-contained, solar-powered domestic toilet and wastewater treatment system. The solar panel will convert the sun’s rays into enough energy to power an electrochemical reactor that Hoffmann designed to break down water and human waste into hydrogen gas. The gas can then be stored in hydrogen fuel cells to provide a backup energy source for nighttime operation or for use under low-sunlight conditions.
• A pneumatic flushing urine-diversion dehydration toilet: Professor How Yong Ng and his team at the National University of Singapore propose to research the development of a decentralized modified pneumatic flushing urine-diversion dehydration community toilet block for five to six households with separate collection and treatment of urine and feces to recover water and nutrients. The toilet system will recover energy from feces combustion and clean water from advance adsorption desalination.

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