Age of effluence: Many rural sanitation systems already fulfil Bill Gates’ conditions for ‘new’ toilets

Bill Gates is not the type of man to let his money be flushed down the toilet, hence the $370 million that he is currently pumping into the design of a lavatory for the future will surely yield solid results.

To be sure, the conditionalities are somewhat constipating as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s design brief insists the toilet should not discharge pollutants or be connected to a septic tank system, and must function without either running water or electricity.

On the contrary, the nextgeneration toilets are expected to ‘capture energy’ — presumably a US variant of India’s ‘gobar-gas’ initiative — and are mandated not to cost more than 5¢ a day.

It is heartening to hear that Gates’ money has led to novel approaches such as putting black soldier fly larvae in toilets to turn waste to ‘eco-friendly’ animal feed, use urine as flushing fluid, convert excreta into electricity with microwave energy and turn faeces into charcoal and also ‘recover’ salt and usable water from it.

Such ‘recoverables’ latent in not only the 2.6-billion earthlings without toilets but the 4.4 billion who have them is enormous, but it is difficult to predict the popularity of the resultant products as items of human consumption or even animal feed considering the reusability of human waste has never been a pressing concern.

The sanitation solutions prevalent in many parts of the world, including vast areas in India, already conform to the foundation’s preconditions about non-energy usage, lack of running water and absence of sewerage systems; unfortunately, they are not hailed as being either eco-friendly or worthy of emulation.

Rather than try to usher in totally novel systems worldwide, the challenge surely should be to build on whatever local applications and knowledge that already exists?