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Gates Foundation spent $200M funding toilet research

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Re: Gates Foundation spent $200M funding toilet research

#71

Post by jniedrauer »

killjoywashere wrote: post #50
docbrown wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I always thought fascinating about Gates was his candid relationship with feces. mindfuplay’s comment reminded me of the famous glass of shit water Gates drank from his Omniprocessor project [0]. But within that 2015 article, Gates mentions a long term plan for seweage and shit[1]: >If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children…

> because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants How do you think economies grow? Job creation at this scale has to be funded out of tax receipts and bonds. The problem is managing the corruption (note: one must assume there are corrupt actors. The trick is managing them).

"Job creation" by itself isn't a very noble goal. Creating hamster wheels for humans to run on is comically cruel and pointless.

Re: Gates Foundation spent $200M funding toilet research

#72

Post by Fomite »

mindfulplay wrote: post #18

This reminds me of software developer who favor deep, technical, architectural work instead of attractive, "sounds cool on paper" sort of work. To an outsider, the animations look cool but the engine that drives the animation is cooler to software engineers. Point being, this is not something a normal philanthropist would imagine being cool and awesome. This takes someone who actually cares about shit (in this case l…

Which is somewhat interesting, because a common criticism of the Gates Foundation I encounter in the field is that they are a little enamored with gadgets and "sexy" targets.

Re: Gates Foundation spent $200M funding toilet research

#73

Post by Fomite »

docbrown wrote: post #40
mindfulplay wrote: post #18

This reminds me of software developer who favor deep, technical, architectural work instead of attractive, "sounds cool on paper" sort of work. To an outsider, the animations look cool but the engine that drives the animation is cooler to software engineers. Point being, this is not something a normal philanthropist would imagine being cool and awesome. This takes someone who actually cares about shit (in this case l…

One thing I always thought fascinating about Gates was his candid relationship with feces. mindfuplay’s comment reminded me of the famous glass of shit water Gates drank from his Omniprocessor project [0]. But within that 2015 article, Gates mentions a long term plan for seweage and shit[1]: >If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children…

> One thing I always thought fascinating about Gates was his candid relationship with feces.

You pretty much can't be in public health, especially not developing world public health, without developing a preoccupation with poo.

Re: Gates Foundation spent $200M funding toilet research

#75

Post by the_duke »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #62

Since I recently read The Expanse, I keep thinking, more than usual, about the basic life supporting technologies we'd need to be able to live anywhere else in the solar system. In The Expanse all biological waste goes into the recycler , which, evidently, feeds a bioreactor to general clean water and new food. It sounds like what Gates is keen to see deployed: Human waste > fertiliser > new food and hydrogen > fuel…

Side question: are the books sufficiently different to the TV series to warrant a reading?

Re: Gates Foundation spent $200M funding toilet research

#76

Post by sytelus »

zukunftsalick wrote: post #60

TOTO has been researching and improving toilets for many years. I've been to their Toilet museum in Kitakyushu, Japan and it's just amazing the research they put into it, specially in water savings measures. What's missing for them, it's to make them more affordable to everyone.

The problem is that there is no way to make toilets "affordable" for people who really need it. These people who live in 3rd world countries barely manage to put up a roof on their head out of whatever material they can gather around. Their lives often run in debts with zero money to spare on anything. They often don't have money for two proper meals a day. The only "affordable" way for them to have toilet is if you built one for them for free.

There are 892 million people without toilet as per Wikipedia. Assuming 10 people sharing toilet, cost of building one toilet is $500 (assuming government gives land for free), solving this problem will require ~$50B investment world wide. This is about half of own money Gates foundation can possibly donate. Also, critical part is ongoing maintenance. So self-maintaining toilets that is very cheap to setup is very critical research to solve this problem.

Re: Gates Foundation spent $200M funding toilet research

#77

Post by peterwwillis »

gnarbarian wrote: post #61
aerophilic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue comes down to cost. As he mentions in the article, the goal is to get to 5 cents a day. Just a basic calculation, a “standard” septic system costs between $1500-4000 to install, and lasts roughly 25 years. Just doing the math on the low end costs brings you to about $0.16 cents a day, 3X the goal Bill Gates is advocating. Note: this isn’t even taking into account the cost of the toilet itself or any plumbin…

Really all you'd need to do to drastically improve things is get them to simply dig a hole for an outhouse instead of the rampant open defecation seen in India and some parts of Africa. We can solve the more complex and exponentially expensive problems of water treatment later. Digging a deep hole gets rid of rampant cholera and incidental exposure. Basically you've got to learn to crawl before you can run a 10k. edi…

Digging a hole is more challenging than you think.

It has to be deep enough, and far enough away from a home, road, water source, food supply, etc. Not all communities have a lot of extra land, so you're talking one or two communal toilets, which need to be large to support a large population, and someone has to maintain them.

If you have the land, you have to have money to construct them, as well as labor. Many households can't afford the $1 (that's one US dollar) construction cost, or the household simply can't perform the labor. In some cases, villages will come together to help fund and construct pit latrines, but these are the exception. Most just put up with the shame and disease of open defecation.

Once you do have them, you have cultural issues like India's manual scavenging problem (http://www.thealternative.in/society/manual-scavenging-thoug...) not to mention you literally have to go out and inform millions of tiny remote villages about why and how to change. It's very hard to get people to change.

Assuming outreach of one week per village, for the 600K censused villages in India, that's 11,506 years to just inform and convince them all to build pit latrines. Even 50 outreach teams would take 250 years. With 500 teams you can cut it down to 23 years.

Re: Gates Foundation spent $200M funding toilet research

#78

Post by z3t4 »

My guess is that those $200 will end up with a reinvention of the outhouse, but with a computer that will automatically open and close the seat. Seriously though, if you live in your own house and have a fairly big garden, and aint afraid to do some shitty work, then the waste can be used as fertilizer. I mean why does it have to be so complicated !?

Re: Gates Foundation spent $200M funding toilet research

#79

Post by tormeh »

jniedrauer wrote: post #71
killjoywashere wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants How do you think economies grow? Job creation at this scale has to be funded out of tax receipts and bonds. The problem is managing the corruption (note: one must assume there are corrupt actors. The trick is managing them).

"Job creation" by itself isn't a very noble goal. Creating hamster wheels for humans to run on is comically cruel and pointless.

Life is a hamster wheel for humans. But, yes, it's a dumb idea.

Re: Gates Foundation spent $200M funding toilet research

#80

Post by ptd »

charlysl wrote: post #74

Gandhi would be proud. https://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2015/10/01/5-things-mahatma-ga... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swachh_Bharat_mission

I've always believed that one of the signs that humanity is headed towards a post-scarcity world is when every human has access to a working toilet with a sanitized plumbing system. Glad to see Gates putting so many resources into solving this issue.

Perhaps we need to start having a conversation about which 'version' of Gates has had a bigger impact on society(not that it matters, but an interesting intellectual pursuit). I vote for post-Microsoft Gates, though I would imagine I'm in the minority.

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