ARTICLE - GATES - NEW MISSION - TOILET 2.0

GATES FOUNDATION LAUNCHES NEW MISSION: TOILET 2.0
(Star Tribune) - By: Jean Hopfensperger

For 200-some years, the world has been using the same type of flush toilet. Is it time for a change?

Jeff Hall knows something about toilets. After digging latrines in Sierra Leone over the summer, he welcomes the new challenge from the Gates Foundation -- a contest to "reinvent the toilet."

Not just any toilet. One that doesn't require a sewer connection, electricity or water, and maybe it even generates electricity.

Turns out the world has basically been using the same type of toilet for 200 years, but 2.6 billion people still don't have one. Hall witnessed the consequences in Sierra Leone.

"There's diarrhea, dysentery, some cholera," said Hall, founder of the Minneapolis nonprofit OneVillage Partners. "Clean water has a big impact on it, and the next biggest impact is the latrine. ... It's a good idea to have more research on this."

For decades, foundations and nonprofits have poured money into digging wells, building latrines, teaching personal hygiene and other strategies to improve public health in developing nations. But the Gates Foundation became the first to issue a toilet challenge. It gave away $4 million to eight universities that will now compete to create prototypes to the replace the 19th-century porcelain wonder.

"No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health ... than the toilet," said Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation's global development program, when announcing the contest last month. "But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world. What we need are new approaches. New ideas."

The challenge grants are part of $41 million awarded by Gates for the not-so-glamorous area of human waste management. The winner or winners will receive cash to turn the designs into prototypes. Those designs, however, must be affordable, harness technology to deal with waste and generate jobs for local economies.

The proposals include:

• A toilet that transforms feces into a charcoal that can be used as fuel or fertilizer.

• A solar-powered toilet that generates hydrogen and electricity for community use.

• A "urine-diverting" toilet that converts urine into clean water that can be used for hand-washing and hygiene.

Clearly a need

Minnesota nonprofits that work in developing countries are watching with interest. Lack of sanitation is a critical problem, they said.

Hall, who once lived in Sierra Leone, said he was initially taken aback that so many people in his village simply relieved themselves in trenches outside the villages. Animals walked through it and brought it back to the village. Children got it on their feet.

In June, he took 26 people to Sierra Leone to build latrines, among other projects. They are the stand-up model, a concrete slab with a hole in the middle, surrounded by an outhouse.

Such latrines are cheap, about $75, and relatively easy to build, Hall said. The challenge for Gates, he said, is to surpass that low-cost, easy-to-build option.

"But there's some very good ideas out there [in the competition]," Hall said, "like using solar energy to treat the waste."

Compatible Technology International Inc., of St. Paul, also welcomes a toilet design that doesn't just cover up human waste. The nonprofit disinfects drinking water in developing countries.

Village water often comes from mountain streams that pick up contaminants -- including human waste -- on the way downhill. The waste also winds up in fields where crops are grown.

Anything that keeps the water supply clean improves public health, said Roger Salway, executive director.

Jeff Brown, president of the Minnetonka-based Haiti Outreach, said a new flush toilet model would be a huge benefit to Haiti. The country has no sewage treatment plants, he said, even for folks with flush toilets in the city. People often defecate "in the open," making the transfer of disease and parasites easy.

Haiti Outreach, which builds wells for schools and communities, is so concerned that it requires people using its wells to have a latrine, he said.

"Reinventing the toilet in that environment would change a lot of lives," Brown said. "There could be incredible application for it."

No easy task

While the contest has captured the attention of Minnesota groups engaged in international development work, it does leave questions, they say.

How will new toilet systems compete or fit with the existing latrine systems? Will the folks who are supposed to use them buy in? Can such high-tech designs be made and maintained cheaply?

Frank Rijsberman, a director for the global development program at the Gates Foundation, said another challenge is that governments have already invested in traditional sewers and some treatment plants. But those flush toilet systems reach only the top 10 percent of the country's population, he said, namely the more well-off in urban areas.

In fact the sprawling slums outside urban centers, with tens of thousands of people and quick-to-fill latrines, could be among the top beneficiaries of toilet technology, he said.

Those same smart toilets could also eventually wind up in environmentally concerned countries and states, including Minnesota.

Said Rijsberman: "We think that if this really works, it will have applications around the world."