Bill Gates Reinvents the Toilet


Bill Gates has emerged as a major player in the battle against improving water and sanitation facilities for the most vulnerable groups of people across the world. One of the greatest tech minds passionately speaking and seeking to the toilet crisis around the world.  The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) have driven this idea of investing and inventing new technologies to improve clean water and sanitation in poor, highly vulnerable countries.  

Who is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF)? 

For those who don’t know, the BMGF is an American Private foundation founded by Bill and Melinda Gates. It was launched in 2000 and was reported to be the largest ‘transparently operated’ private foundation in the world valued at $42.3 billion in 2017 (Chepkemoi 2017).  The foundation is a huge supporter of innovative projects primarily around areas of poverty, healthcare and education. This foundation serves the world and regularly collaborates with NGO’s and organisation like the World Health Organisation and UNICEF, to assist and alleviate the most pressing issues around the world. Did you know that the its healthcare budget alone exceeds the WHO (Chepkemoi 2017). 

This foundation clearly has the financial means to provide and create innovative solutions to the water and sanitation crisis across the world. It is clear to see that the BMGF has created their own goals and vision to help succeed in the positively changing the world.  
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation (BMGF) vision is to: 

“Enable widespread use of safely managed, sustainable services, contributing to positive health, economic and gender equality outcomes for the world's poorest.” 

Challenges faced by the BMGF: 

The foundation recognises that inadequate sanitation is a massive a problem especially as the rate of growth of the population is only increasing further intensifying the water supply and sanitation problem. The fact that about 4.5 billion people use unsafe sanitation facilities or defecate in the open. That’s more than half the world’s population. The BMFG have assess the situation occurring in our planet and realise that there is a one-size-fits-all solution to this crisis. The BMGF explains how past sanitation systems such as toilets, sewers and wastewater treatment systems are not the best solutions for the future. Especially in some poorer nations, where money, infrastructure, water and land are not enough to support and maintain these systems. On top of that dense unplanned rapid urbanisation has created chaos which has meant that introducing new infrastructure such pipe and sewage systems are difficult and unsafe. Amazingly it is estimated that the lack of proper sanitation cost the world an estimated $223 billion every year. Yet it has been estimated that every dollar spent on sanitation provides a return of at least $5, this has given the BMGF the economic opportunity to invest into sanitation facilities. 

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Strategy: 

The strategy the BMGF has is to collaborate with government leader, the private sector and technologist to advance and innovate new, radical toilet and water treatment technologies, models and policies to revolutionise the sanitation industry.  One of the core initiatives that I have investigated is the investment in technologies such as reinventing the toilet, so that households radically change how they manage human waste. The BMGF had seen that the greatest potential for progress was to focus efforts in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and China. These were locations where towns and cities were continually shifting, changing and growing and the need for good sanitation was high. It was also area where the governments were more open to the adoption of new technologies, especially since population growth and water scarcity was intensifying. 

Reinventing the Toilet 

Bill Gates and his foundation are on a mission to reinvent the toilet for over 2 billion people who lack access to clean water.  In 2011 the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge was initiated by the BMGF, that looked to generate and support new approaches for toilet technologies that safely and effectively managed human waste. It looked to reinvent toilets that could be installed anywhere including crowded urban spaces. These technologies had the potential to be life changing.  

The challenge aimed to create a toilet that: 
  • Removed germs from human waste and recovered valuable resources like clean water and energy  
  • Operated off grid, without connections to water, electricity or the sewer 
  • Costs less than $0.05 cents per user per day 
Bill Gates and his foundation has spent more than $200 over the span of seven years funding the sanitation research (Gale 2018). That showed his dedication and commitment. In the Reinvent the Toilet Expo 2018, whilst holding a beaker of human excreta addressed the sanitation issue. Gates explained that by sterilising human waste it will help end 500,000 infant deaths and save $233 billion annually in cost from diseases caused by poor water and sanitation.  He also went on to state that the reinvented toilet market could generate $6 billion a year by 2030 worldwide. 

The BMGF has backed a waterless toilet called the Nano Membrane Toilet. It’s a toilet that treats human waste onsite without any external energy or water. The toilet is designed for a single household for up to 10 people and accepts solid and liquid human waste. It converts the solid waste into energy that powers the toilet membrane process and ash. Whilst the liquid waste is converted into water that can recollected and used in washing and irrigation. This certainly is an unique and very interesting toilet. 



However, this isn’t the only invented toilet out there. Tiger Toilets, is an example of sustainable ingenuity at its best. It was founded in 2015, with over 4000 unit in place all over India (Brueck 2019). This toilet is unique compared to the Nano Membrane Toilet, as it is not as high tech and requires no maintenance, water or sewage systems. How you say? These toilets have biological agents, Tiger worms, an organism that feed on faeces (Priya 2019). It breaks down the human waste efficiently into a mixture of excellent fertiliser, water and CO2. The worms can’t escape and need our human waste to live. A win-win! The worms leave behind no stench, flies or mosquitoes and removes 99% of pathogens (Priya 2019). Most of all this Tiger Toilet system costs about $350 to install (Brueck 2019). The BMGF awarded a grant of almost $5 million to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to perfect the technology (Priya 2019).  

The future of toilets is looking bright. With Bill Gates and his BMGF leading the technological transformation of sanitation industry. Let's all look forward to surprising new inventions coming up in the future. 





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