Bill Gates-backed SOLAR POO RAYGUN COMMODE unveiled Bill Gates' Microsoft gigawealth giveaway charity has already conferred many benefits on a suffering humanity*: today we learn of yet another, as boffins reveal a magnificent waterless solar raygun portaloo which uses focused sunbeams to incinerate human excrement and turn it into a miracle charcoal style substance with many …
"and one that is waisted (ahem) by just flushing away."
Maybe in your part of the world. In the UK raw sewage is settled into sludge and liqors, the liqors are treated to biological oxidation, further cleaned and the water returned to the watercourse, and the sludge is subjected to anerobic digestion (often with methane recovery for CHP uses). Most (about 75%) of digested sludges are used a farming fertiliser and soil conditioner.
There's a few areas that don't do this (eg because of heavy metal contamination of the sludges from industrial processes) but these are getting fewer and fewer as standards improve (and as China takes on the dirty work), and there's a few areas where its uneconomic to transport the solids to suitable agricultural or land reclamation sites.
This kind of research isn't fashionable, but can make a huge difference. I like that they go for the unfashionable problems because they're 1) more likely to have more unexplored possibilities and 2) not going to get much private investment and 3) as an engineer I see that's better bang for buck and 4) as an engineer I scoff in the face of fashion...
Excellent idea, and some good lateral thinking, but this whole appropriate/alternative technology often works best when it can be fixed by a village blacksmith/odd-job-man - how common are African odd-job-men who can hadle fibre optics?
And one question - I assume the wee is filtered out into a tank for direct use on the fields, otherwise it'll take a lot of sunlight to boil it all dry.
On the plus side this could also help in countries where they've got water but chop down a lot of tress for fuel.
On the negative side I can't quite see how this works. If you have a dump some of it goes down the sides and doesn't neatly collect in a nice box at the bottom.
A flushing toilet copes with this by using water to wash down most of the "remains" but how does that work in a dry lav? I seem to be always cleaning up after the kids, even with a flushing bowl......
> I assume the wee is filtered out into a tank for direct use on the fields, otherwise it'll take a lot of sunlight to boil it all dry.
I don't know, but I did stumble upon this:
http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/pee-power-recycling-urine-to-powder-makes-superior-fertilizer.html
And the Swedes have been making toilets with a pee part and a poo part:
http://www.ecovita.net/ekologen.html
Another comes to mind. What happens during the night time when there's no solar heat? Does it all gather up in overflow? I hope they've got enough storage to last until the next day. BTW, what does burnt excrement smell like? Will it cause air pollution? I suppose all the NIMBYs out there will try to get it stopped by some environmental regulation.
Who needs fiber optics ? Mirrors suffice, the rest is just boffinry. Besides, I do not get this whole idea. They are using a Ferrari to tow a trailer ...
1. We have discovered organic degradation quite some time ago, why not use that ? If they insist on trying to create fossil fuel alternatives, they could also simply have the excrements dry out in a conventional, yet enhanced, sun oven (with only mirrors, no fiber optic bs).
2. This system is overly expensive, difficult to maintain, with very little gains and very poor performance in terms of m3 of waste - WTF are they doing ?
3. How are they gonna get the mass into there ?
I do not get it...
What they should do where they do not have sanitation facilities is use sun toilets ... This is just complete utter waste of resources and my time, thanks !
There have been sunny Glastonbury festivals, but not enough for these to be the bog standard bog! I dare say that a demonstration unit might be displayed in the 'Green Fields' area.
To be fair, festival toilets are better than they used to be. The cleanest are those by the mixing desk islands in the middle of the crowds in front of the big stages. You'll need to ask the security guards permission to hop over the scaffold partition, but they can be understanding. Always carry your own absorbent material. Beer and cider will make your trips to the dunny far more frequent, so remember that other mood-altering substances are available.
I wish I had appropriated the door of a Portaloo (TM, the 'Hoover' of the toilet world) at Glasto about a dozen years ago... some Bristoliann bloke had stencilled a picture of a monkey on the door, and apparently such things are worth a lot of money now that some shark/cow-worrier collects his efforts.
"Perhaps the smelly portaloos at festivals are a thing of the past."
Ignoring the practical problems of lack of sun and the high volume of deposits, I would guess that during the "bake off" the aroma could be even worse than cr@pping in a bucket of chemicals, since the heat will drive off all the aromatics and volatile components.
Google: Let's put the Internets into helium balloons and float the across Africa, so they can find out exactly what's killing them from laptops they can't afford
Gates: Let's give them innovative toilets, mosquito nets and stoves instead, so they don't die before they get the Internets.
I know which I'd go for - even before factoring in the despicable waste of helium.
> Let's put the Internets into helium balloons and float the across Africa, so they can find out exactly what's killing them from laptops they can't afford
Did Google say that their balloon project was aimed at Africa? I assumed it was a geographically neutral system which could be deployed across the world (as opposed to only sunny places, in this toilet's case). Besides which, mobile phones are VERY popular in Africa. Increased coverage can only be a good thing for those who rely on them for economic, education, and medical information and alerts.
You also seem to be forgetting that Google is a for-profit entity with some charitable projects, whereas Gates' foundation is itself a charity, whose (supposed) sole purpose is to fund such projects (which occasionally directly aid for-profit friends-of-Gates).
Poor farmers could afford more things (seed, schoolbooks, medicine) if they got a fair market price for their produce. With a mobile phone (or just their own SIM that they can use in a shared phone) they don't have to take a middleman's word for the current prices.
We lucky blighters might use most of our bandwidth for cat videos, but that doesn't mean that a little data can't go a long way. Just think of of the utility that we used to get from Teletext (weather, stock prices, news etc)
In fact this could rank as the ultimate in shiny toys for the rich boys looking to splash the cash. Why go to all this expense and technical jiggery-pokery when compost heaps have been happily digesting waste, often creating enough heat to actually burn, quite naturally. It's a huge sledge hammer of an idea to crack a relatively simple nut. Humanity has been disposing of sh1t for centuries, with or without water, so why the need for this hi-tech monstrosity. Again all I can think of is this need for rich guys to have the biggest shiniest technology they can point to and say 'I did that'.
Education about treatment and dispersal of sewage and simple sanitation techniques would solve this problem much more easily and cheaply, but then there would be no big hi-tech toy to play with.
"It's meant for users in hot equatorial areas where water is scarce and so, sadly, is proper sanitation in many cases."
Sorry to be an arse but most of the wettests places on the planet are on the equator, even in Africa, where for some reason most people assume that its really arid?
Long drops are seriously bad for health, particularly in hot countries, they do not represent proper sanitation. You may be able to use them for a week at a festival, but as anyone who has been to Glastonbury knows they stink to high heaven as soon as there is any heat. There is a reason that they're being replaced with the plastic tardis type of toilet because - staggeringly - the tardis represents more sanitary environment.
The person mentioning a "long drop" was on target. IF the people there in Africa would even dig an outhouse. Teach a man to fish, eh? Rather teach a man to bury his feces.
Theres nothing "sanitary" about a port-a-loo either. They stink as much as an outhouse in the African sun.
Let alone some high tech toilet that's supposed to burn shit into oblivion. Like that isn't going to smell bad downwind.
Exposed excrement stinks...its one of the facts of life you learn over time.
Unless your shit don't stink. (and that's VERY unlikely unless you're Bill Gates)
Teach a man to fish, eh?I can't help feeling, wherever Bill Gates is concerned, that it goes a bit more like: "Sell a person a fish, and you have sold one fish. Teach a person to fish, and you can sell them expensive, proprietary bait and tackle for the rest of their life."
Expensive proprietary technology that can't be maintained by village craftspeople with standard tools invariably ends up broken and useless, and causing more problems than it was meant to solve. A fairly low-tech pit latrine with an elevated vent pipe that actually gets used is better than people just shitting any old place because the last of the hi-tech superbogs put in only a few years ago is broken, and there is no sign of the original team of Western aid workers who installed them in the first place and might have stood a chance of repairing them.
"staggeringly - the tardis represents more sanitary environment.".staggeringly it's not true at all, it's about volume. Shit does not dry in a tardis it's just easier to dump in the river. It's really only about too much shit and piss at the same spot. Wild life does not represent much of a sanitary problem as they never invented the loo. No shit, no shit icon. And I would suggest Gates should spend more time trying to improve education, health care and other efforts to decrease the percentage of poor in the USA.
Fortunately it's only there to turn the chocolate tube-steak into charcoal, same way that you can turn wood into charcoal I guess. Heat the stuff up in an environment that's as oxygen-free as you can get it.
700 watts, in an insulated box the size of a bucket, should be enough to thoroughly roast whatever you put in there.
The process of making biochar from organic material is exothermic, so this invention looks good from an energy standpoint. What isn't mentioned is what they do with the syngas and oils that are produced. Depending on the temperature at which the process runs these comprise half or more of the mass. It would also be useful to have some means of recycling phosphorus to use as fertiliser.
The separation and transformation of co-products needs a fair amount of basic industrial chemistry and it's not clear how, where or even if this part of the process is carried out.
Having travelled overland thru Africa for three months, visiting most places starting with "Z", and many others, all I can say is I came to really appreciate a freshly dug longdrop.
There were flush toilets (squat) with no running water that people still used, that I had to use.
There were long drops with wicker lids, writhing with maggots in the full sun.
There were outhouses that reeked of ammonia so strongly, you literally couldn't breath. Literally.
There were times we dug our own shallow holes in a farmer's field and did our business there.
In the Serengeti, you don't even go behind a bush. Lions lurk behind bushes. You do it on open ground.
I was just a visitor. I only began to understand the issues faced by the locals every day for their whole lives.
So I applaud initiatives like this. Anything that makes life better for rural Africans. Anything that "just works", requires minimal and simple maintenance, and costs very little, can only be a good thing.
The mosquito laser has gone nowhere for years because Intellectual Ventures are holding onto the patent and not letting anyone actually do anything with it. I hope Bill has learned from this and will ensure that whichever toilet design is deemed most worthy will actually get made instead of being (ahem) sat on by big business.
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