Resolutionists Reinvent The Toilet.Resolutionism and Technology Come Together For
A Global Sanitation System A multi-disciplinary team at Loughborough University led by Professor M.Sohail has won a prestigious grant of approximately £250,000 in an international competition to “re-invent the toilet” organised by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The programme was launched at the AfricaSan conference in Rwanda this week as part of the Foundation’s new $40 million Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene strategy. |
How Did This Begin?
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people—especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life. Based in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by CEO Jeff Raikes and Co-chair William H. Gates Sr., under the direction of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.
To Learn More about the Loughborough programme, the full press release is available on the Loughborough University web site.
Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people—especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life. Based in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by CEO Jeff Raikes and Co-chair William H. Gates Sr., under the direction of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.
To Learn More about the Loughborough programme, the full press release is available on the Loughborough University web site.
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Resolutionism World Water And Waste ManagementResolutionism promotes a global water and waste management system available to all without distinction. This system will be created, regulated, and subsidized which monitors and controls the provision of water and waste management services aimed at builing and promoting good health.
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RESOLUTIONISTS GET INVOLVED
We here at the Save Our Earth Now Foundation think this is an epic opportunity, and we want in! We have also taken it upon ourselves to re-invent the toilet.
Not to take away from or discredit the work of the team at Loughborough, we here at SOEN are not totally inspired by the prospects of their designs, altough there is great potential. We believe that we can do better. We believe that this new programme that we are working on is an opportunity to take us to a higher level of civilization. We believe we can come up with the toilet that will Save The World!
Our Goal: to prototype, conceptualize and design innovative ways and means of disposing human waste to save the world.
Why is this so important to us?
Lack of adequate sanitation facilities affects around 40% of the world’s population, with 1.1 billion people worldwide defecating outdoors. 2.6 billion people who don’t have access to safe hygeneic waste and sanitation systems. This includes toilets, sewers, water treatment plants, or containment of waste. This affects roughly 2/3 of Earth's population. The results kill more people than any other major problem on Earth. In our quest to save the world, how could ignore an opportunity like this, to help out our brothers and sisters, and to perhaps do something historic for future generations?
What do we do with all that doo doo?
For the other 1/3 of Earth's population with access to toilets, sewer systems and massive infrastructures that collect and treat our water and sanitation systems, we take the flush for granted. We simply press a button or a lever and watch it all disappear. There are a number of problems that come with this.
Water is arguably the most important resource on Earth. Clean water is piped to us through massive grids of expensive infrastructure, which can often flow up to hundreds of kilometers, and 40% of it us flushed down the drain. In areas without that infrastructure in place, they would not agree that it is a good idea to take all this time and money paying for all this clean water, just to be flushed down the drain.
Waste is also a resource. Raw sewage starts to break down using oxygen dissolved in the water, but once the oxygen is used up, micro-organisms continue the process anaerobically (without oxygen). This produces nutrient-rich effluent (which could be used as fertilizer) and methane gas (which could be used as fuel), both of which could be harvested, stored and sold, however, we also know that methane is an even more harmful pollutant to our atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
Pollution is a problem all over the world. Defecating outdoors like 2/3 of the population, results in poor sanitation which is the major cause of diarrheal disease - the second largest killer of children under five - which claims around 1.5 million lives each year. Most untreated effluent is left to sink into the water table, or run into rivers which end up in the sea. The nutrients in this effluent causes algae to bloom, which dissolves oxygen in the water, which can have disasterous consequences on marine ecosystems.
Resolutionist Sanitation System
“To address the needs of the 2.6 billion people who don’t have access to safe sanitation, we not only must reinvent the toilet, we also must find safe, affordable and sustainable ways to capture, treat, and recycle human waste,” said Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the Global Development Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
We believe we must take it a step or two beyond that. Resolutionsts are firm in the belief that all people must have equal access to safe, hygeneic waste and sanitation systems, including toilets, sewage systems, water treatment plants, and/or sustainable containment and recycling of human waste. To this end, we call upon experts in Chemical, Biological, and Engineering departments from all over the globe to help us come up with the technology for the Resolutionist Sanitation System, using innovation and awareness to bring health and comfort, working with communities, students, governments and people of the Earth for all of the people of the Earth.
The Loughborough team will deliver the results of this work at a meeting in August, 2012 where research outcomes will be presented to the Gates Foundation to forecast future developments. We want to be ready with our own concepts, designs and prototypes at the same time.
To learn more about how to help, please contact us @ [email protected]
Updates on our progress will be posted here, and on our facebook page at: www.facebook.com/resolutionism.howtosavetheworld