A waterless toilet that turns poo into power | Hacker News Reader

A waterless toilet that turns poo into power

theguardian.com

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895347

Neat idea, but it won't be adopted in third world countries. Its too complex, and if it requires any maintenance, it will be thrown away once it stops working. That's a common theme with these kinds of devices targeting poor nations.

Though I see what you're saying and it is a problem, that seems too dismissive. Like any other technology, it can improve over time.

What about the other side of the issue that doesn't plague third world nations: http://www.naturesplatform.com/health_benefits.html

Also it costs over 18USD annually to operate, not an insignificant expense.

The toilet is sold with a service contract. Try looking at it another way. This is a toilet that has a fraction of the waste of a traditional toilet. The waste leaves the home in the back of a truck driving on a road instead of in a sewer pipe. This is for areas that do not have sewer and may completely skip sewer as a sustainable revolution happens.

Third world? This could be useful where I live in Aotearoa. We use septic tanks in my corner of the country and many of us are switching to composting toilets. We could really use this sort of thing

Really? I have found that things seem to a lot less disposable in third world countries. Saying that it does seem to have parts which aren't going to be easy to replace.

> Saying that it does seem to have parts which aren't going to be easy to replace.

Which makes it inherently disposable - if one of those parts breaks, they won't be able to fix it locally.

People in these places can be quite ingenious with physical hacks.

They can, though I'm having trouble imagining they'll be ingenious enough to fix things that require very precise engineering or nanofilters.

That's first world country mentality.

Energy footprint of an average African is minuscule. They probably use and reuse quite a lot of stuff, efficiently without disposing it and requiring more energy for novelty production. One of the reasons for it is poverty, you really can't act like stuff is in abundance when it's not.

It's about maintenance / serviceability. Unless it can be field-patched with duct tape and some clever woodworking, people in poor countries are going to be SOL when some crucial component breaks down. A device that can't be maintained locally is pretty much a throwaway, and as you say, they prefer to reuse quite a lot of stuff.

Absolutely. Membranes will foul, things will clog, it's basically doomed in a developing world environment.

Re. Service contract/rental model, the economics of providing that service are extremely challenging. People who need this product have very little money to spare. The price would need to be set low enough, and in those price ranges the profit margin basically disappears.

For other interesting companies doing this with these cost and pricing issues in mind see:

http://www.xrunner-venture.com/

http://resourcesanitation.com/

Edit: full disclosure, second link is my brother's venture in the space. I've heard a lot about toilets over dinner for many years :)

The toilet OP linked to is a real toilet experience. Flush and forget with no exposure to what went down before you. These http://www.xrunner-venture.com/the-toilet/4586730377, http://resourcesanitation.com/our-concept/ are nothing more than outhouses.

I tend to agree with this, as a hobby project I've been designing a nominally self sufficient cost effective habitat for 500 to 2000 people (roughly 500 "family" groups). And sanitary waste disposal is an issue. My current thought is 'hole in the floor' type latrines and a wind (or solar) powered system which periodically dumps water through the system to move everything to the collection site. At that point you might be able to employ some of these techniques as a more generalized form of management.

First world patronising Africa, again.

As if the minute amount of power produced by this shameless, transparent attempt at viral marketing will ever recoup the cost of production of the device itself, let alone the R&D budget or maintenance cost.

This is like a Toyota Prius with 10x worse environmental impact. Its biggest impact is on the conscience of people who are predisposed, literally, to believing bullshit, so that they can continue to eat diesel-ship-fuelled sushi and fly on aircraft, a single hour of which will negate a lifetime of sitting on an environmental toilet.

People downvote you but there's definitely some truth there to find.

Thing about these projects is long-term gain. Maybe these toilets will pay off in 20-30 years, they have to, if they want to be sustainable.

But yes, a single plane flight would negate all of the savings. It definitely negates all of the energy you save by showering with cold water, by recycling, by turning of the light.

It is definitely a gigantic problem when India, China, Africa turn into energy hungry giants that already are Germany, USA, UK etc.

We'll see how it all will turn out to be, business seems as usual, hope that's going to change fast.

http://www.withouthotair.com/

A great book that describes how simple and easy it is to analyse sustainability - purely by numbers.

I'm sorry you got downvoted. I've nothing to do with the people who make this toilet, or those who plan to sell it, or the site the article was published on (except of course that I'm a regular reader) so if there is some attempt at viral promotion I got nothing to do with it.

I don't see the article as patronising, but then again I don't live in Africa.

Also, for what it's worth, until recently I didn't fly. I'm an immigrant, living and working away from home; when I went home for the holidays I'd cross Europe by train and boat, which took me three days (and cost more than flying btw). I've had to relent recently, because I just don't have enough holidays time anymore :(

I really hope I don't just believe any old bs, but how should I know? I mean, if I did believe any bs, I wouldn't know it was bs, would I?

Interesting, a friend of a friend of mine is the founder of http://saner.gy/

They've been very successful in Kenya.

From the last time around :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895347

Reply on news.ycombinator.com