World: Bill Gates wants to bring some big changes to the toilet
- No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world. What we need are new approaches. New ideas. In short, we need to reinvent the toilet.
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation global development program president Sylvia Mathews Burwell • Offering two things: One, an opportunity for toilet humor (we’ll pass), and two, an honest argument by Bill Gates’ group that perhaps the sanitation industry hasn’t gone far enough in the third world. So they want to figure out a way to take a device which the first world has taken for granted and improve its weaknesses, so that it works without a nearby sanitation mechanism, it’s cheap and human waste is treated and somehow recycled or changed into a form which is harmless and doesn’t spread disease. He has the money to do it, guys — let’s just hope there aren’t any blue screens of death that hit when you have to go. source
