Sanitation and Water: Reinventing the Toilet

Background

Over the past few months, I have been watching various documentaries and movies relating to the global water crisis. A documentary that I found interesting was Inside Bill’s Brain, which is a three-part series about Bill Gates’ life. Included in this three-part series is how Bill Gates helps develop technology to help solve global issues. Watching this documentary led me to do some more research about Bill Gates’ work in helping solve the global sanitation crisis.

Sourced from: https://www.yidio.com/show/inside-bills-brain-decoding-bill-gates/season-1/episode-1/links.html?utm_source=Bing&utm_medium=Search&t_source=64&utm_campaign=1434&msclkid=9c47c615d5d711cc308da5baf536bfb2

Image: Bill Gates’ Inside Bill’s Brain

Scope of the global sanitation crises:

· 2.3 billion people, around 29% of the world, worldwide still do not have access to basic sanitation facilities. Basic sanitation facilities include places for safe disposal of human waste and maintenance of hygienic conditions (including garbage, industrial, and hazardous waste collection as well as wastewater treatment/disposal).

· 4.5 billion people, around 60% of the world, do not have access to safely managed sanitation

· 1.1 billion people, around 15% of the world, still practice open defecation

· Poor sanitation is the 18th most common cause of death, killing 775,000 people each year.

Sourced from: https://ourworldindata.org/sanitation#:~:text=Unsafe%20sanitation%20is%20responsible%20for%20775%2C000%20deaths%20each,15%25%20of%20the%20world%20still%20practice%20open%20defecation.

Image: Death rates due to poor sanitation

What has been done to date:

In 2011, the Bill Gates Foundation challenged the world to reinvent the toilet. The goal of the “Reinvent the Toilet” program was to create a toilet that would process waste locally, without the need to connect to a sewer system. These toilets would help places without modern sewage systems and proper waste processing/disposal.

The world responded to Gates’ challenge, and within the decade, many toilets were created. Lots of these toilets turned human waste into valuable resources, including water, fertilizer, and electricity.

The documentary

In his documentary, Inside Bill’s Brain, Bill Gates highlights the $50,000 toilet. Though it is called a toilet, it is more like a waste processor and will serve as a central sewage processing station. When waste is put into the machine, it converts it into clean, drinkable water. Because this toilet is expensive, it would not be inputted into every home. Instead, it would serve as a communal sewage plant and be placed in the middle of a town, slum, or city, so people can safely get rid of their waste and get clean water at the same time.

Sourced from: https://us.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hspart=ima&hsimp=yhs-remarklist&p=4.5%2F6&type=q3020_D3L4M_ext_bcrq

Image: the $50,000 toilet

Learnings

Something that I learned from his documentary and my research of the sanitation crisis is that the sanitation crisis is directly related to the water crisis. When human waste is not properly processed and cleaned, it finds its way into nature. In one jar of untreated human feces, there could be up to 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs. Latrines, or outhouses, and open defecation, or excreting outdoors, directly contribute to the sanitation and water crises. Latrines contain lots of untreated waste and open defecation puts untreated waste directly into nature. Within this waste are deadly diseases that seep into nature. Because of the lack of proper sanitation, these diseases have found their way into water sources around the world, contaminating the world's clean water.