Tag: sanitation

Impact Lab > sanitation
Bill Gates, Ecological Products, Home Technology

How Bill Gates aims to save $233 billion by reinventing the toilet

Gates Foundation spent $200 million funding toilet research

LIXIL is among companies drawn to potential $6 billion market

Bill Gates thinks toilets are a serious business, and he’s betting big that a reinvention of this most essential of conveniences can save a half million lives and deliver $200 billion-plus in savings.

The billionaire philanthropist, whose Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spent $200 million over seven years funding sanitation research, showcased some 20 novel toilet and sludge-processing designs that eliminate harmful pathogens and convert bodily waste into clean water and fertilizer.

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Breakthrough Thinking, Globalism, Great New Product, New Inventions, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

The Peepoo – A Disposable Toilet That Could Help Grow Crops

peepoo

Children in Kenya with the Peepoo

Anders Wilhelmson, a Swedish entrepreneur, is trying to market and sell a biodegradable plastic bag that acts as a single-use toilet for urban slums in the developing world.  Once used, the bag can be knotted and buried, and a layer of urea crystals breaks down the waste into fertilizer, killing off disease-producing pathogens found in feces.

 

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Ecological Products, Globalism, Great New Product, Great Videos, Green Friendly, New Inventions, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

Windbelt: Small-Scale Wind Power To Help Power Third World

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ0v-CK63-4[/youtube] 

 Working in Haiti, Shawn Frayne, a 28-year-old inventor based in Mountain View, Calif., saw the need for small-scale wind power to juice LED lamps and radios in the homes of the poor. Conventional wind turbines don’t scale down well-there’s too much friction in the gearbox and other components. “With rotary power, there’s nothing out there that generates under 50 watts,” Frayne says. So he took a new tack, studying the way vibrations caused by the wind led to the collapse in 1940 of Washington’s Tacoma Narrows Bridge (aka Galloping Gertie).

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Analysis, Big Problems, Hot Issues, People Making a Difference

Today is World Toilet Day

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Holy Crap! This is a big problem.

Did you know?

2.5 billion people do not have somewhere safe, private or hygienic to go to the toilet.

One gram of faeces can contain 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts and 100 parasite eggs.

The simple act of washing hands with soap and water after going to the toilet can reduce diarrhoeal diseases by over 40%.

Safe disposal of children’s faeces leads to a reduction of nearly 40% in childhood diarrhoea.

19 November is World Toilet Day – a day to celebrate the humble, yet vitally important, toilet and to raise awareness of the global sanitation crisis.

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