For over a decade, Bill Gates has had a distinct focus on toilets. As part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge launched in 2011, part of an effort to transform toilet technologies to manage human waste safely and effectively for the billions of people using unsafe sanitation facilities across the globe.
The latest project in this challenge comes from Samsung, which created a toilet that uses no water and can turn human waste into ashes.
Born out of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, the research and development arm of Samsung Electronics, the team presented the finished core technologies and a "successfully developed and tested prototype," to Gates as part of a partnership between the two groups, according to a Samsung press release.
The three years of research and development from Samsung led to a prototype good for household use and the development of components and modular technology with the goal of easy commercialization.
Core Samsung technologies include heat treatment and bioprocessing to kill pathogens from human waste and make the released effluent and solids safe for the environment. The toilet system enables the treated water to be fully recycled. Solid waste is dehydrated, dried, and combusted into ashes, while liquid waste is treated through a biological purification process.
Samsung plans to offer royalty-free licenses of patents related to the project to developing countries during the commercialization stage and will work with the foundation to bring the technology to mass production.
Dubbed as energy efficient, the toilet requires no water, serving as a bonus for use in remote areas, the same places where the nitrogen and micro-pollutants from human waste can prove dangerous to the environment and people that encounter it.
The Reinvent the Toilet Challenge has remained on a steady course since its inception in 2011, including hosting Reinvented Toilet Expo events over the years. "There are 4.5 billion people in the world without access to adequate sanitation systems," Doulaye Koné, Gates Foundation deputy director of water, sanitation, and health, says in a past statement. "We need new science and new engineering to solve the problem."
Since John Harington invented the flush toilet in 1596, it hasn't seen a ton of changes, even though developed countries now have sewage systems and waste treatment plants. Still, nearly one billion people are forced to defecate outdoors, and the World Health Organization and UNICEF say 2.8 billion people live with unsafe sanitation facilities, leading to disease.
The first Reinvent the Toilet Fair was held in Seattle in 2012. Since then, there have been dozens of research teams at events in China and India, with the best prototypes being awarded continued funding to improve their designs.
"We've been able to move these ideas from prototype in the lab, to field testing, to maturing the technology for use by real customers," Koné says. "We are at a stage where companies are coming forward to license these products and develop them for commercial launch."
The Samsung partnership with Gates gives the company the needed backing to turn an idea into a toilet.