According to information stated on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website, unsafe sanitation is a massive problem that is becoming more urgent as our global population increases and trends like water scarcity and urbanization intensify.
Quoted from the foundation’s strategy overview on water, sanitation & hygiene:
- About 4.5 billion people—more than half the world’s population—either practice open defecation or use unsafe sanitation facilities and services.
- Poor sanitation, which is widely accepted as a chief contributor to waterborne diseases, is the cause of more than 1,200 deaths of children under five-years-old per day, more than AIDS, measles, and tuberculosis combined.
Summarized by Reuters citing the information from above article, poor sanitation kills nearly 500,000 children under the age of five annually and costs an estimated $223 billion a year in the form of higher health costs and lost productivity and wages.
So, what’s the proposed solution?
Toilet That Transforms Waste Into Fertilizer, Doesn’t Require Water or Sewers
“We are all here for one reason: because more than half the world’s population doesn’t have the safe sanitation they need to lead healthy and productive lives. The current toilet simply sends the waste away in the water, whereas these toilets don’t have the sewer. They take both the liquids and solids and do chemical work on it, including burning it in most cases,” Gates said in a speech on Tuesday in Beijing as the billionaire philanthropist kicked off the Reinvented Toilet Expo in China backed in November 2018.
In the way that a personal computer is sort of self contained, not a gigantic thing, we can do this chemical processing at the household level ~ Bill Gates
Check out the tweet below for further information:
There are few things I love talking about more than toilets. pic.twitter.com/rQdY3ZiIpC
— Bill Gates (@BillGates) November 5, 2018
