Innovation: Burning faeces and recycled urine: Bill Gates and Samsung develop high-tech toilet

Is the end of toilets as we know them? The South Korean company Samsung announced last week that together with the Bill</p>In 2011, the foundation of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his ex-wife Melinda started what they called the "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge".

Innovation: Burning faeces and recycled urine: Bill Gates and Samsung develop high-tech toilet

Is the end of toilets as we know them? The South Korean company Samsung announced last week that together with the Bill

In 2011, the foundation of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his ex-wife Melinda started what they called the "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge". The initiative aims to develop new toilet technologies that can safely and effectively dispose of human feces. As part of this, Samsung and the Gates Foundation have teamed up to develop a toilet that doesn't require a typical waste water system and instead efficiently treats waste water.

Heat treatment and bioprocessing technologies aim to kill pathogens in human waste and make wastewater environmentally safe. The system completely recycles the water used. Liquid waste is cleaned using a biological process and turned back into clean water. Solid waste, on the other hand, is dehydrated, dried and incinerated to ash.

According to Samsung, developing countries should receive royalty-free licenses for patents for the high-tech toilet. The company and the Gates Foundation plan to continue their collaboration to bring the toilet technologies to mass production. They are currently looking for industrial partners for commercialization and design.

Bill Gates is said to have been personally involved in the development process of the toilet. According to Samsung, he met with Samsung Vice Chairman Jay Lee in early August to discuss how the company could get the toilet to those people who need it most.

According to the WHO and the United Nations, around two billion people lack access to safe drinking water and 3.6 billion lack safe sanitation. This sometimes leads to the fact that every year 500,000 children under the age of five die of diarrheal diseases.

Sources: Samsung, The Byte

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