Bill Gates has been working in recent years on the challenge of reinventing the toilet (Reinvent the Toilet Challenge), this with the intention of “changing the lives of millions of people who lack adequate hygienic conditions.”
It is a toilet that, through the use of technologies, does not use water to remove waste.
As a project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it was first featured in the 2011 Water, Sanitation and Hygiene program, Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, to develop transformative toilet technologies that can manage human waste safely and effectively.
According to the foundation, the goal of creating this toilet is to generate innovative solutions that can protect individuals and communities from infections transmitted by human waste and allow governments to provide truly inclusive sanitation services that reach the poorest communities.
This project has the collaboration of Samsung, which reported that the Samsung Institute of Advanced Technology (SAIT) kept working on the design for three years, which led to the successful development of a prototype for use domestic.
The company alleges that the aforementioned product is energy efficient, with effluent treatment capacity and meets the performance required by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the marketing of a reinvented toilet for home use.
“This device features heat treatment and bioprocessing technologies, which eliminate pathogens from human waste and make human-generated effluents and solids more environmentally friendly,” Samsung said in a statement.
He added that the system enables the complete recycling of treated water. Solid waste is dewatered, dried and burned to ashwhile liquid waste is treated through a biological purification process.
Through a meeting in late 2022, Bill Gates and Samsung Electronics Vice President Jay Y. Lee met to discuss the outcome of the Reinvented Toilet project and brainstorm global social contribution initiatives.
The South Korean company said it plans to offer royalty-free licenses to project-related patents to developing countries during the commercialization phase.
Also, he will continue to provide close advice to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help bring the technologies into mass production. The two organizations will work together to identify industry partners willing to commercialize the technology, after making the design more efficient for mass production.