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 grow up healthy.
>Western toilets aren’t the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn’t feasible in many poor countries.
He also mentions he wrote about toilets before in a 2012 article titled “Reflections on the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge.”[2]
Digging deeper into that article brought me to a PDF from the Gates Foundation outlining grants from their 2011 program: “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge” [3]
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[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVzppWSIFU0
[1]:https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Omniprocessor-From-Po...
[2]:https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Reflections-on-the-Re...
[3]:https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/Documents/wsh-reinvent-the-...
I'd say his relationship is with humans. People are his ends. Feces (i.e., the lack there of) are his means. It's a stunning example of hope (not being lost).
What's most impressive to me is a $200 million investment over 7 years, has the potential to "return" $200 billion __annually__. The lottery seems to break $200M a couple+ times per yer.
Editorial: It's amazing what you can accomplish for the price of a handful of F35 fighter jets.
sadly our investments don't align in the high return ways.
You pretty much can't be in public health, especially not developing world public health, without developing a preoccupation with poo.
What kills the most people? Of those things, which can be realistically improved?
In the sailing community more and more people are using composting toilets: https://farmingmybackyard.com/diy-composting-toilet/
As long as it is disposed of safely (properly composted), the cost here is the composting material.
RVs have holding tanks that must be emptied. Thus, they aren't called "septic tanks".
But I'm sure the term is used loosely.
Our local township has an ordinance where every residential sewage system (10k residents, not sure how many systems that is) has to be pumped out and inspected by a certified sewage hauler. This way, the homeowner knows about and is required to make simple repairs before the entire system fails.
If you let the fat and oil solidify at room temp and dispose of them in the trash, and if you use regular soap in the recommended amount, and if you septic tank additive once in a while, you will be tearing the problem at the source, and will only need to take care of the tank when it’s time to replace it in 40 years.
Septic tanks are not closed systems they are open and intended to provide an environment that can produce a bio-reactor while maintaining drainage through the soil.
Many good systems don’t need to be drained other than every few decades in fact good systems would outlast the tank and the filtering substrate it’s built on so when the time comes you need to dig out the tank and the gravel and other filtering particulate it used because that is what has degraded.
The problem with septic tanks is that they don’t scale we’ll have one on a large property in the middle no where that 5 people use and it’s a great solution have a bunch of them and worse over use one in particular and you get a polluting mess.
But septic tanks also don’t solve the other problem with western toilets and that is the amount of water they consume which is simply unfeasible for many developing regions.
TLDR; if the septic tank was installed and sized correctly it will outlast you even without pumping it, but it’s not a solution the reason we don’t use them in cities is because they don’t and can’t scale with urban population densities.
Other areas like those in which ground temperatures drop below freezing for long period of time might also require tight tanks and constant pumping since the cold may stop the reaction in the tank so it would surprise me if tanks in places like say N. Dakota would be pumped year before winter to prevent them from freezing shut and overflowing.
Every few decades for a properly sized and properly functioning system.
That sounds about right if the goal is to keep a system that's not properly functioning (not enough microbes to break down solids) from filling up to the point of causing problems. You won't go wrong if you follow that advice but depending on what goes into your septic (do you have a garbage disposal, do you do laundry with bleach, number of people in household, etc) you may be able to go an order of magnitude longer. Recommending a system be pumped every 3-4yr is like a 3k oil change, it's excessive in the overwhelming majority of use cases but it will make more money for whoever does the work and not cause a system to fail in a way that comes back to bite whoever installed it.
Sometimes legal departments force them to include those recommendations in order to err on the side of "absurdly overcautious." And sometimes the recommendations are merely prudent! I'm not saying you can wait longer, just that installers may have a motivation to exaggerate.
I suppose there will be very small amounts of minerals that don't break down but they are insignificant.
Note: this isn’t even taking into account the cost of the toilet itself or any plumbing needed.
Basically you've got to learn to crawl before you can run a 10k.
edit: You can get someone who is completely illiterate and cut off from civilization to understand the concept of digging a hole for the shit to go in. This has the added benefit of not requiring advanced manufacturing technology or materials. they just have to dig a hole and move the outhouse top over to the new hole when the old one gets full. This makes them self reliant.
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.
Literally any deep hole practically anywhere is a damn sight better than open defecation straight into the river, on the bank, or all over the streets. And it doesn't take an act of congress to fund it and change building codes, a civil engineer, excavator, and team of union laborers to get this stuff done like it does in the west. You just need someone who is personally motivated and determined and a shovel ideally. like this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi
All you need is one person who knows that digging a hole would keep his kid from getting sick and dying and you'd have more trouble trying to stop him from digging that hole for an outhouse.
When that clicks for them. That their kid or wife or husband wouldn't have died if they bothered to dig an outhouse, they will be doing the work and telling everyone they know and also nagging people till their ears fell off when they catch someone shitting in the street.
Hell, I was in Chongqing a couple months ago and saw a teenager literally unzip, in full view of everyone, and pea on (on, not into) a recycling bin. Next to a god damn public toilet.
In the middle of a shopping center.
Near a police officer.
A lot of people just don’t care.
I've seen people poop on the train platform in NJ. Really crazy, but Newark does not open the bathrooms until 7-8AM. So when you're waiting for the 3AM train to DC... what you gonna do?
Taking a shit in the street is perhaps not such a problem if you clean it up afterwards? Culture is hard to change, but perhaps it can be accommodated?
innovations drive change drive more innovation. I recommend Hans Rosling's talks. There is no such thing as the "Third World" anymore, they're all on various development trajectories. Don't think e.g. Somalia is typical for Africa.
Anyone know which country is this considering?
But when they're not kept up. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...
Seems Bill Gates is trying to improve the whole system, not just some technical aspect. Which also differentiated MS from most technical companies.
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).
If a corporation would try to do that in US, it would be called price dumping and trigger antimonopoly lawsuit against them, but somehow, when it's done to poor African countries we consider it OK, and even expect them to be gratefull for it.
EDIT: I think that China does much better job helping them by making actual investments in their economies, building railroads, factories, etc. You might question their intentions, but you cannot question the results.
>How do you think economies grow?
sometimes not by taking debt for public infrastructure they have no way of maintaining
Then what's he doing at 1:52?
Although granted, the Janicki Omniprocessor website says that it doesn't quite produce drinking water quality.
Then build it! No magic tricks there.
I think, this is the most infuriating trait I see in all Silicon Valley "sophisticated person" types.
I also assume that to ensure water pressure involves electricity - a lot of poorer countries do not have a constant or reliable electricity supply.
Building this sort of infrastructure is a massive engineering task and it can take years to complete a project like this. It requires skilled engineers and labour. During that time, people will die because it's not done yet.
In conclusion, I think Gates and co have made a good investment.
Today water pressure in the western world is mostly generated by running finely controlled electric pumps constantly, but it wasn't too long ago that water towers were used everywhere to maintain water pressure. The advantage of a water tower is that you can run an inaccurate oversized pump occasionally to fill up the reservoir on top of the tower, and gravity does the rest of the work.
Of course building a tower capable of holding many tons of water is a comparably complex civil engineering task and is costly in materials.
In most cases it's not. You park a ground level tank on one of the taller hills in town.
>It requires skilled engineers and labour
Exactly, and there are no tricks around that are known to solve that, other than to engage in massive infrastructure projects. A very simple thing.
When you have a serious issue in production that can be fixed with a global variable in 5 minutes or spending a day correctly planning and implementing a fix that routes the data correctly, what do you pick? I'd hope doing the first thing and replacing it with the second.
It's that sort of decision, only people die if you don't move in time.
In the same time, most banal sewers and septic tanks take days to build.
Without that, you have no functioning cities, and without that, no modern day economy.
> What trait?
The believes in all kinds of trickery. No will to deal with issues the straight way. Such people spend more time looking for a shortcut, than dealing with an issue at hand.
Look: Mr. Gates spent $200m on a magic toilet that is nowhere to be found. That's enough to build 5 small electric power stations, and 5 small sewage treatment plants in a third world country.
How many people lives were improved with magic toilet, and how much by building more infrastructure.
There was a nice movie about an engineer that was in Thailand (not sure about the country) to build a dam. long story short a civil war start in the country and he is a main target because infrastructure investment from outside to build an infrastructure you cannot maintain only puts you in a death spiral of debt.
Bill Gates the businessman was ruthless in his pursuit of dominating the markets he was in, and was largely successful, to many people's dismay.
Bill Gates the philanthropist is doggedly persistent in identifying and working towards fixing some of the major problems human-kind faces, and he's an actual hero to millions (me included, at this point).
The same person, with the same attitude and drive, just applied to a different goal. I think that's amazing.
He is good at solving big problems by forcing everyone to work the same way. Which is good until that becomes a stupid way of working that hurts everyone.
And the mining capabilities of the graphics hardware is cooler to cryptocurrency investors.
Full circle?
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 literally) to invest time and money into it.