The good news Bill Gates Drinks Poop Water – IGN News
Bill Gates Names Winners of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge
SEATTLE (August 14, 2012) – Bill Gates today announced the winners of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge—an effort to develop “next-generation” toilets that will deliver safe and sustainable sanitation to the 2.5 billion people worldwide who don’t have it. The awards recognize researchers from leading universities who are developing innovative ways to manage human waste, which will help improve the health and lives of people around the world.
California Institute of Technology in the United States received the $100,000 first prize for designing a solar-powered toilet that generates hydrogen and electricity. Loughborough University in the United Kingdom won the $60,000 second place prize for a toilet that produces biological charcoal, minerals, and clean water. University of Toronto in Canada won the third place prize of $40,000 for a toilet that sanitizes feces and urine and recovers resources and clean water. Special recognition and $40,000 went to Eawag (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology) and EOOS for their outstanding design of a toilet user interface.
One year ago, the foundation issued a challenge to universities to design toilets that can capture and process human waste without piped water, sewer or electrical connections, and transform human waste into useful resources, such as energy and water, at an affordable price.
The first, second, and third place winning prototypes were recognized for most closely matching the criteria presented in the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge.
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Ideas/Media-Center/Press-Releases/2012/08/bill-gates-names-winners-of-the-reinvent-the-toilet-challenge
A $350 toilet powered by worms may be the ingenious future of sanitation that Bill Gates has been dreaming about
Worms may not have spines, but they’re doing some back-breaking sewer work in more than 4,000 toilets across India.
Since 2015, a creative new type of toilet called the Tiger Toilet has been popping up outside homes and schools around the country. From the outside, this toilet looks like any other pit latrine. But it doesn’t smell like one. Instead, it comes with a built-in population of tiger worms.
“Their natural breeding, natural habitat is in cow dung heaps, or horse shit heaps, that kind of thing,” Ajeet Oak, director of the Tiger Toilet company, told Business Insider. “Poop. That’s where they like to live.”
The toilets involve no traditional flushing and aren’t hooked up to a sewer system. Instead, the worms are contained in a container below the toilet, and they feast on feces. The creatures’ activity leaves behind a mix of water, carbon dioxide, and a small amount of wormy compost (that’s technically the worms’ poo, though it’s much less toxic and more nutrient-rich than ours).
“We estimate that by 2030, the opportunity here is over $6 billion a year,” Gates said.
Read More: Bill Gates is so obsessed with redesigning the world’s toilets, he brought a jar of poop onstage in Beijing to prove it
How worms clean excrement
Tiger worms, or Eisenia fetida if you prefer the scientific term, are animals that love to eat waste. This makes them a perfect composting solution, and they especially love what falls into their Tiger Toilet compartment.
“These worms, they won’t escape on their own, because they won’t survive in just soil,” Oak said. They need our human waste to live.
The Tiger Toilet system costs about $350 USD to install and requires no connection to drainage pipes or a mainline sewer.
Once a person does their business in the toilet, they send their waste down into the worm-filled compartment below using a pour-flush system, usually with a little bucket of water. (There are no handles or automatic flushing devices in the Tiger Toilet.)
The toilet’s cleaning stats are impressive: they process feces, remove 99% of the pathogens, and leave behind no more than 15% of the waste by weight, in the form of compost material. The rest becomes water (around 60-70%) and carbon dioxide. That’s better performance than a septic tank.
Plus, the leftover byproduct makes for “excellent fertilizer,” Oak said, because its mix of nitrogen, phosphorous, carbon, and potassium is good for growing plants.
Tiger Toilets (and Tiger worm-powered treatment plants, like the one pictured below) also don’t breed mosquitoes or attract other flying menaces.
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Bill Gates Is Saving the World, One Toilet at a Time
The billionaire opens up about his Netflix docuseries, Inside Bill’s Brain, which paints a full picture of the Microsoft whiz as it illustrates his quest to save humanity from itself.
I never thought I’d be discussing poop with Bill Gates. And yet here I was, listening to one of the world’s great tech minds expound on “the chemistry of human feces.”
Finding innovative solutions to grave global dilemmas is one of Gates’s major obsessions, and few things are more problematic in the sprawling megacities of the developing world than sanitation. While most of the über-rich busy themselves buying art, property, and elections, “Bill chooses to spend a lot of his time thinking about shit,” filmmaker Davis Guggenheim said with a chuckle. The director of critically lauded documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and It Might Get Loud, Guggenheim met Gates while shooting the education doc Waiting for “Superman” and decided that the Microsoft entrepreneur and billionaire philanthropist would make an ideal subject. Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, the resulting three-part documentary series, drops on Netflix September 20.
Guggenheim might well have called it An Inconvenient Poop. Like his Oscar-winning 2006 documentary about Al Gore’s crusade against global warming, the new series sets out to educate its audience through the portrait of one man with a larger-than-life mission. “When I pitched it to Netflix, I told that executive: I’m going to do the best episode you’ve ever seen about toilets,” Guggenheim recalled. That made them laugh—but the director was deadly serious about getting viewers as absorbed by the challenge of solving some of the world’s most intractable problems as Gates is.
The series delves into three of the huge issues that Gates and his wife, Melinda Gates, are trying to solve with their foundation: polio eradication, climate change, and improving sanitation to prevent needless child deaths. Gates sounded slightly puzzled as he pointed out that Guggenheim chose “not to focus on the things where we have success, like cutting the childhood death rate from 12 million a year under the age of five dying in 1990 to 5 million a year now.” Instead, the director delved into areas where his foundation faced setbacks and struggles. Both the resurgence of polio and the challenge of creating affordable, self-maintaining sanitation technology proved not to have easy fixes: “We’re not in nirvana yet,” Gates quipped, “but we feel like we’re getting pretty close. I still think we’re going to succeed on all three [projects].”
More on Vanityfair Joy Press is TV Correspondent at Vanity Fair.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/09/bill-gates-interview-netflix-inside-bills-brain
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Women Health Care
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.
https://www.everydaycares.com/health/toilet-requiring-no-water-or-sewage/
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/video/why-bill-gates-spent-200-000000346.html