Why Bill Gates Wants to Reinvent the Toilet

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Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft who has morphed into the world's best-known philanthropist, wants to reinvent the toilet.

This next big idea for the good of mankind will now also be getting help from German taxpayers after Development Minister Dirk Niebel earmarked $10 million for a joint project with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Over the next five years, this project aims to provide 800,000 people in Kenya with access to sanitation facilities and ensure clean drinking water for 200,000.

The goal is to find "innovative solutions" for sanitation in poor urban areas. Gates says it's time to move on from the era of the classic toilet. He points out that, despite all the recent achievements, 40% of the world's population, or some 2.5 billion people, still lives without proper means of flushing away excrement. But just giving them Western-style toilets isn't possible because of the world's limited water resources. (See pictures of the global initiatives of Gates' foundation.)

The matter is urgent: the lack of sanitary installations and hygienic waste removal furthers the spread of disease. UNICEF estimates that 1.1 billion people worldwide don't have access to any kind of toilet or ways of eliminating waste. That, in turn, fouls drinking water and can cause diarrhea, which spreads quickly.

According to UNICEF, at least 1.2 million children under the age of 5 die of diarrhea every year; the main cause is contact with human feces. At the end of June, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon - together with UNICEF - approved a five-year sustainable sanitation plan under which the number of people who have no access to toilets would be halved by 2015. (See the top 10 famous toilets.)

Ban emphasized that sanitary installations not only play a decisive role in reducing world poverty, but they are crucial for sustainable development and for making it possible to achieve Millennium Development Goals.

Dutch engineer Frank Rijsberman agrees. He heads the Water, Sanitation & Hygiene department at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and he is presently working on two projects. With one project, the foundation supports the construction of pit latrines in rural areas and slums without sanitation facilities. With the other, it supports research projects, giving grants to scientists who come up with new ideas for using human excrement. He says there have been experiments to turn excrement into a kind of microwave that can be used as a source of energy.

He says there are biological bacteria that could turn waste into compost; he talks about the possibility of toilets actually turning urine into drinking water. Human waste could be a real gold mine, Rijsberman jokes. In view of the world's limited water resources, both the Gates Foundation and German Development Policy support various projects for dry toilets that do not use water to flush and that separate excrement from urine in order to dry it.

Another method put forward by the Gates Foundation in South Africa is using the urine of 400,000 people to make nitrogenous fertilizer in powder form. A similar albeit high-tech variation is currently being tested by the Society for International Cooperation in Eschborn, Germany. Germany and the Gates Foundation's projects are complementary, says the German Ministry for Development. The importance of this research is not always easy to explain, says Rijsberman, because anything having to do with human waste provokes a "yuck factor." (See Bill Gates in his younger years.)

Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of those concerned are far from convinced that it's a good idea to use toilets in the first place. "We have a lot of work ahead us," says Rijsberman, who knows he can count on his boss's full support.

And the billionaire himself seizes every opportunity to lobby for the end of the traditional Western toilet. In April, Gates met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Christian Wulff in Berlin. In a press conference he told journalists that they didn't talk politics, but discussed the idea of the "ultimate toilet."