Bill Gates wants to reinvent the toilet for mankind
physorg.com
physorg.com
Original: http://home.tudelft.nl/en/current/latest-news/article/detail... which, unlike the physorg blogspam, includes links to sources with more information.
Really?
The brother of my grandfather lived on a farm for all of his life; there was never any kind of toilets on the farm. While there always was access to clean water from a well (which may not be the case in the poorer parts of the world), running water was installed inside the "house" only in the early sixties. "House" is between quotes because it looked more like "the part of the stable to be used by humans".
We used to go there often during the summer. We did our business behind the house, like everyone. We loved everything there.
And what about health? My grandfather's brother died past 80; when he died his wife moved to the "city" where she lived to see her 94th birthday.
They would've had a hard time believing people would ever want to gasify their poo with "plasma created by microwaves".
In fact, so do I.
The article is talking about developing countries with poor sanitation. Banupur, for instance, has a population of 58,000 per square mile.
What the the population density on your grandfather's farm? Do you think doing your business behind a house scales to 58,000 per square mile?
At that density, you either are long dead from a cholera epidemic, or have a proper sanitation system already in place for decades, rendering this system completely irrelevant for the application being proposed - to provide a "waste disintegrator" for those without plumbing.
56000 people per square mile is about 3 times the density of São Paulo (where I live - about 7500/km2), which is slightly larger than New York's. Let's say it's 4 NYC's one on top of the other.
Can you imagine New York without sanitation? Me neither.
The article is misleading in using the world "toilet" - the serious problem it addresses is sewage, not toilets.
I don't know, but I wouldn't answer "of course not" right away, as you seem to assume. How do these people currently cope?
My point was not that everyone should do as my grandfather's brother, twenty years ago. I'm just wondering why we suddenly need so much technology to solve a problem that's always been with us and that didn't use to be so terrifying.
I'm wondering if we're afraid of "human waste" a little more than we should? I'm wondering if maybe there are simpler solutions that would scale a lot more, be a lot cheaper and a lot less disruptive than getting everyone to defecate in a microwave oven. (How do you build the devices? How do you get them to the people who will be using them? How do you make people use them? How to you maintain them? How do you replace them when they're broken? What do you do with the broken ones...?)
I read a story some time ago (on HN maybe?) about how very simple advice had tremendous effects on people's health. Telling people to wash both hands after going to the bathroom, for instance, instead of just the one they use to clean themselves, yielded incredible results.
I may be wrong, but this project, as described in the original article, doesn't sound right.
Have a look at some of the health problems that come up due to the fact that around 6-700 million people in india defecate openly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_...
"In India there are 700 million people who do not have access to safe and hygienic toilets. The waterborne diseases this causes kill 500,000 children every year, mostly from diarrhea,"
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Health/20071102/toilet_summit_0711...
While yes the proposed solution does sound complex, it's better to try and make it work than just let the spread of disease continue
Results: Children younger than 15 years living in households that received handwashing promotion and plain soap had a 53% lower incidence of diarrhea (95% confidence interval [CI], –65% to –41%) compared with children living in control neighborhoods. Infants living in households that received handwashing promotion and plain soap had 39% fewer days with diarrhea (95% CI, –61% to –16%) vs infants living in control neighborhoods. Severely malnourished children (weight for age z score, <–3.0) younger than 5 years living in households that received handwashing promotion and plain soap had 42% fewer days with diarrhea (95% CI, –69% to –16%) vs severely malnourished children in the control group. Similar reductions in diarrhea were observed among children living in households receiving antibacterial soap.
Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, but only within the last ten thousand have we been living in cities with population densities even close to that of Banupur (for instance). I'd reckon that these kinds of sanitation problems are actually very new to humanity, at least from a historical or evolutionary standpoint.
EDIT: This sound similar to the "autoimmune diseases and allergies are due to a lack of parasites and other bacteria" theory (or is it still a hypothesis?).
I can't help reading this with a shocking lack of seriousness, that has me imagining the potential for weaponized portable microwave toilets. Something that fires 'gassified poo plasma'. Which you reload by... you know. An appallingly destructive (and stinky) weapon, with the drawback that reloading takes a while, and you don't want to be disturbed while doing it.
How long till this appears in a game? "BCG' Bill's...
http://www.radiolab.org/2009/sep/07/
(it's the part about farmers, not sure about a specific seek to point, sorry it's been a while)
EPIC way to say "for god's sake keep shitting"
What baffles me is that the people bright enough to invent it didn't come with a similarly brilliant excuse to deploy it.
If I recall, you can't pee in them due to ammonia, but there are separate ways to handle fluid wastes.
Perhaps the articles is just trying to disguise the use of incinerators.
Is this really a problem that needs a new solution?
We are talking mostly about places without proper sanitation, how are they supposed to have (and sustain) facilities for generating plasma?
Left to itself human waste degrades and the residue can be used for fertilizer or maybe even fuel. A cesspit or septic tank provides for safe storage until it is ready for disposal, preferably in a way that aids the local population.
For anyone who doesn't think this is a big problem, picture taking DOUBLE the population of the USA, moving them to an area ~1/3 the size and having them defecate in the open with no sanitation. This (from what I've read) is pretty much the situation in India, where more people have mobile phones than access to proper toilets.
Not sure how this works, but it sounds like it would only worsen the situation.
I think it's interesting to notice that most (I try hard not to write all) comments so far seem to be armchair designer style. It's like 'build the next toilet' is a new bike shed.
Yeah, I'm skeptical as well, but assuming that the scientists are full of .. err - just want to grab the money and have no clue what they are talking about seems weird to me..
Only partly joking. Gates has signed on with the Bilderbergers, and their clearly stated objectives are to radically reduce world population by any means and as soon as possible. Figures in the range 500 million to 900 million (survivors) frequently pop up in Bilderberger-related stories.
One thing to watch would be the financial estimates. Keeping technology like that working in remote/undeveloped locations won't be cheap. If the Gates Foundation is going to foot the bill for operational servicing of the 'microwave toilets' on a large scale, then...
Bill Gates has done more for the poor than all the conspiracy theorists in the world combined.
I've heard Alex Jones. I don't see any evidence that the Bilderberger meetings are discussing mass murder.