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Wednesday 7 January 2015

Bill Gates' Latest Passion: A Machine That Turns Feces Into Water

Bill-gates
"I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyor belt and drop into a large bin," Gates, theMicrosoft cofounder and billionaire philanthropist, wrote in a blog post on Monday. "They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water."
The jarring juxtaposition is intentional. Gates intends to get the word out to the masses about the machine, which is part of a Gates Foundation effort to improve sanitation in poor countries. "The water tasted as good as any I’ve had out of a bottle," Gates continued. "And having studied the engineering behind it, I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe."

As the video below explains, the machine, called the Janicki Omniprocessor, turns sewer sludge into electricity, clean drinking water and ash. The machine, named after Janicki Bioenergy CEO Peter Janicki, dries the waste and then burns it, creating steam that powers an engine that creates electricity. Meanwhile, the water removed from the sludge is filtered, creating clean water.


The machine addresses a major inefficiency in the developing world. Some 2 billion people use latrines that aren't properly drained. That waste contaminates water, which leads to the death of more than 700,000 children each year, Gates wrote in the post.
This isn't the first time Gates has meditated on the link between poor sanitation and disease. Since 2011, Gates has been pushing for a redesign of the toilet that was off the grid and lacked piped-in water, a sewer connection or outside electricity, but might convert the waste into fuel or fertilizer. Such a device would eliminate the type of contamination that occurs in the developing world.
At the moment, the Janicki Omniprocessor is being used in a pilot project in Senegal. Gates would like to see the idea spread across the developing world to reinvent the sewage treatment plant. Most modern plants don't use the waste as energy, but instead store the dried human waste in deserts and are powered by diesel or some other non-renewable energy source.

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