Billionaire
activist Bill Gates is backing an innovation in water filtration that turns
human poop into drinking water. The OmniProcessor could bring clean water to
millions of people and help solve the problem of debilitating diseases.
RT.com reports the
OmniProcessor, designed and built by Seattle engineering firm Janicki
Bioenergy, burns human waste to produce electricity and water. The processor
powers itself through the use of a steam engine and does not emit an odor. The machine
could handle 14 tons of waste from 100,000 people, producing up to 86,000
liters of drinkable water a day, and net 250 kw of electricity.
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At
a demonstration of the OmniProcessor shown on GatesNotes, a smiling Bill Gates
drank water from the machine, which was previously untreated sewage.
“It’s water,” said
Gates in the video.
He
wrote on his blog: "The
water tasted as good as any I’ve had out of a bottle. And having studied the
engineering behind it, I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe."
Gates
said that 2.5 billion people – or 40 percent of the global population – have no
access to safe sanitation, and many people use facilities that do not safely
dispose of human waste. About 1.5 million children die every year from
contaminated food and water, and half of all patients in hospitals are there
because of problems with water and sanitation. It is extremely costly to try
and create sewage infrastructure in cities and towns that already exist, so
Gates thinks the low cost water treatment machine could be revolutionary.
“If
you can get thousands of these things out there, then you’ve ensured the people
really will grow up in a healthy way,” Gates told Wired. “They’ll live much higher quality lives.
You will save a lot of lives. And you’ll have local entrepreneurs who are
maintaining these things.”
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The OmniProcessor, which
costs US$1.5 million, will undergo a pilot launch in Dakar, Senegal later this
year.
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