HUMAN feces may be part of the answer to addressing sanitation issues that cause thousands of deaths each year.
A new system called the Omniprocessor, developed by Janicki Industries Inc. and funded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, converts human waste into drinkable water and elecricity.
In a video posted on Gates’ blog, the Microsoft founder is seen drinking a cup of water that, just a few minutes before, used to be poop.
“The water tasted as good as any I’ve had out of a bottle,” Gates wrote in his blog. “And having studied the engineering behind it, I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”
Peter Janicki, CEO of Janicki Bioenergy, explains in the video that in the system, sewer sludge is boiled. Water vapor is then separated from solids, which are burned. This, in turn, creates steam that is sent to an engine; the steam drives a generator to create electricity. The resulting energy is used to power the Omniprocessor, and any excess electricity can be sent to the community.
The water vapor created is run through a cleaning system until the water is pure enough to drink. The system also produces pathogen-free ash.
A more advanced version of the Omniprocessor will be able to convert waste from 100,000 people into 86,000 liters of potable water daily and produce 250 kilowatts of electricity.
“Why would anyone want to turn waste into drinking water and electricity?” Gates wrote.
He cited that poor sanitation kills about 700,000 children each year and prevents more from fully developing mentally and physically.
A 2013 World Health Organization and UNICEF report states that 2.5 billion people worldwide lacked “improved sanitation facilities.”
“If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy,” Gates wrote.
The goal is to make the processors affordable enough so that entrepreneurs in low- and middle- income nations will want to invest in them and subsequently establish profitable waste-treatment businesses.
A pilot project is slated for later this year in Senegal. If things go well there, Gates said they’ll begin searching for partners in the developing world.
“If we get it right, it will be a good example of how philanthropy can provide seed money that draws bright people to work on big problems, eventually creating a self-supporting industry,” he wrote.
(With reports from BBC and Bloomberg)
(www.asianjournal.com)
(LA Weekend January 10-13, 2015 Sec. A pg.7)