Bill Gates and Samsung have collaborated to create a new toilet that sets your poo on fire.
First started in 2011, the project is part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge.
The challenge aims to source solutions to protect people from diseases transmitted via human waste and enable governments to implement sanitation services for the worst-affected communities.
In 2019, Samsung joined forced with the Gates Foundation to create the innovative new toilet.
According to Samsung, the toilet recycles urine through a purification process: “The system enables the treated water to be fully recycled. Solid waste is dehydrated, dried and combusted into ashes, while liquid waste is treated through a biological purification process.”
Meanwhile, the solid waste is “dehydrated, dried and combusted into ashes”.
Products like these could be life-changing for the approximately two billion people around the world who currently lack access to safe drinking water.
Being able to dispose of human waste safely means that human waste-borne germs and bacteria are less likely to pollute drinking water sources and therefore spread throughout communities.
Diseases like cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid, and polio are often rife in communities without clean water.
Conditions can be especially dangerous in crowded urban areas, regions that are flood prone, or where reliable infrastructure is scarce.
And 3.6 billion people are forced to use unsafe sanitation facilities, resulting in half-a-million children under the age of five dying every year from related diseases.
