Some people will hope if the technology classmate Bill Gates will show off the latest technology in public. But Gates did it in a unique way. He lifted a jar of human feces in front of students participating in the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing, China.
The jar containing the feces is just an introduction to explain Gates’s new project, the latest toilets of the future. Gates has an ambition to replace sanitation around the world using toilets without water. According to Gates, water carries a lot of viruses, parasites and germs.
The stools he showed, said to contain 200 trillion rotaviruses, 20 billion shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs. This project is one that was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation since 2011.
The foundation contributes 200 million US dollars to develop toilets that can be operated without water, without sewers, or electricity lines. The toilet will remove bacteria from human waste, and the operational costs are only less than five cents a day.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are at least two billion people consuming drinking water contaminated with feces, as gathered from Gizmodo on Thursday (11/08/2018). The toilet named Nano Membrane was developed by researchers from Cranfield University.
They use a series of serrated wheels, screws, and have two spaces to separate liquid and solid materials, as well as to clean and store waste. Like most toilets, after defecating or defecating, the lowered toilet cover will make the stool fall and separate from the wet reservoir to dry.
The stool will then be dried in small granules. Once a week, small grains can be removed or made into fertilizer. While for urine, it will be accommodated, purified, and accommodated in other storage, which then recycled urine is claimed to be used for irrigation or washing purposes.
“I have to say, a decade ago I never imagined that I knew so much about feces,” Gates told the participants at the Reinvented Toilet Expo. This is not the first time Gates demonstrated technology related to feces. In 2015, he drank distilled water from human feces to show water purification technology.