'Magic' toilet research funded by Bill Gates foundation
CBC News
Posted: Jul 20, 2011 4:43 PM ET
Last Updated: Jul 20, 2011 6:31 PM ET
 |
| A worker in a slum in Nairobi, Kenya, tries to unclog a pit latrine, before loading a cart and dumping the effluent from slum pit latrines into a local watercourse. The Reinventing the Toilet Challenge hopes to replace this kind of toilet with one that quickly converts urine and feces into clean water, mineral ash fertilizer, carbon dioxide and energy. (Khalil Senosi/Associated Press) |
Cheap, waterless toilets that can turn human waste into clean water and fertilizer within 24 hours are being designed and built by eight engineering teams around the world, including one from Canada.
The goal of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's $3-million Reinventing the Toilet Challenge is to bring affordable, sustainable human waste treatment to the 2.6 billion people in the developing world — about 40 per cent of the world's population — who have no access to flush toilets. That, in turn, is expected to reduce the number of children who die each year of diarrheal diseases — a figure reported by the Gates foundation to be around 1.5 million.
"I think it's a really important problem," Yu-Ling Cheng, the director of the University of Toronto's Centre for Global Engineering, said Wednesday. She is leading one of the eight teams that won a $400,000 grant to turn their proposed toilet design into a prototype within one year. All eight prototypes will be displayed at a showcase in Seattle next summer.
No comments:
Post a Comment