> In the first step of Delft University's new technical approach, the human waste will be dried. Then the waste will be gasified using plasma, which is created by microwaves in tailor-made equipment. (etc)
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".
> 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.
Yes, a surgeon who worked in Nepal for charity for 10 years told me that his impact would have been greater digging ditches for sewers. Open sewers are a serious health issue in third world urban centers, enabling disease to spread quickly.
The article is misleading in using the world "toilet" - the serious problem it addresses is sewage, not toilets.
> Do you think doing your business behind a house scales to 58,000 per square mile?
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.
"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,"
Effect of Intensive Handwashing Promotion on Childhood Diarrhea in High-Risk Communities in Pakistan
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.
You guys are going to rail me bc I don't have any sources, but I remember hearing that in many cases in the third world where purified clean water is introduced, health actually deteriorates because there is much disease and the clean water prevents children from developing antibodies to the these.
Sounds possible, though barely. A quick search hasn't found any sources for that, and I don't feel like wading through the millions of research papers about clean water, so I'm going to have to assume that this is untrue unless you can find sources. Good sources, because it goes in the face of all of the knowledge about the horrible things that unclean water cause [you're making the claim that there are "many cases" where people become sicker over the course of decades (or at least several years, due to the mechanism you point to) when they have clean drinking water. I think that I'm allowed to be skeptical].
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'm just wondering why we suddenly need so much technology to solve a problem that's always been with us [...]"
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.
That doesn't mean its population density can't be higher per square mile. It just means that the city is smaller than one square mile. I can't find a direct source for Banupur, but Bally, which is nearby, works out to about 56,000 people per square mile (22,000/sq km), according to the town's official web page: http://howrah.gov.in/Templates/Area_popu.htm .
"In the first step of Delft University's new technical approach, the human waste will be dried. Then the waste will be gasified using plasma, which is created by microwaves in tailor-made equipment."
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...
There's a technology called - battery. Some hold energy for quite a while. And the article mentions Rwanda. If the prime market is this huge continent, then you might be able to use the sun to augment the "other energy source".
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..
good that he decided to address the issue at the receiving side of the system, not at the producing - i mean, with his money he could have commissioned a some "human anatomy and physiology improvement" research ...
Aren't they over-thinking this a bit? This seems like the Microsoft-ification of crapper design, i.e. gratuitously complicated, unmaintainable and essentially irrelevant to the basic problem.
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.
"Aim of this project is to develop new technology for processing human waste without links to water, energy, or sewer lines, and at costs affordable to the poor in developing countries."
This existed many years ago, and worked great up until "intelligent humans" decided it was progress to defecate in clean, drinkable water. It was called an outhouse.
So, you don't have sanitation, but, somehow, they figure out you would be able to maintain and operate a self-sustaining facility that gasifies your waste using microwave heated plasma that's also, somehow, compact enough you don't have to build the sanitation system you didn't have in the first place to drive your waste into the facility.
What baffles me is that the people bright enough to invent it didn't come with a similarly brilliant excuse to deploy it.
Aren't there already cheap composting toilets that safely and relatively odorlessly compost human waste, without he assistance of a bunch of grant-hungry, plasma torch-wielding scientists.
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.
This is a very worthy cause, but I think they might be overdoing it. The issue is major - the number of people without access to toilets is roughly equivalent to the number of people with internet access... last chart of this infographic: http://feefighters.com/blog/ff_infographic/tech-boom-or-bubb...
I'm glad Bill is putting some money towards this. It seems quite complex but if they can make it cheap and easily maintainable it could save a lot of lives.
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.
Considering Bill Gate's previous on-record comment about how improved vaccination programs could _reduce_ population, I wouldn't be surprised if there'll be some 'accidental consequences' of this system. How much fertility reduction do you get if everyone sitting on a 'microwave toilet' has their testicles 'slightly' cooked?
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...
"The world today has 6.8 billion people... that's headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent."
-- Bill Gates (in public speech with published video)
I saw the video, the quote is correct. Don't have link handy, find it yourself.
Did he mis-speak? Maybe. He never corrected it, despite it going viral.
38 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 90.7 ms ] threadReally?
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.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/291/21/2547.full
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?).
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.
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...
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..
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"
Original: http://home.tudelft.nl/en/current/latest-news/article/detail... which, unlike the physorg blogspam, includes links to sources with more information.
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.
This existed many years ago, and worked great up until "intelligent humans" decided it was progress to defecate in clean, drinkable water. It was called an outhouse.
Humans are idiots.
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.
Not sure how this works, but it sounds like it would only worsen the situation.
Is this really a problem that needs a new solution?
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.
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.