Build a Better Toilet to Get Rich and Popular

A sustainable, energy-producing toilet for developing countries has meant a flood of phone calls--and an investment from Bill Gates

Caltech/Michael Hoffmann

Since word got out that Michael Hoffmann and a team of his students had developed a state-of-the-art, sustainable, energy-producing toilet for rural, developing countries, his phone has begun to ring much more frequently.

Hoffmann, a California Institute of Technology professor, was the team leader for Caltech's winning entry into the Bill and Melinda Gates contest to invent a more sustainable toilet. He and his team of six developed a flushing toilet that sanitizes the water and produces hydrogen from human waste to create electricity. One upshot was a $100,000 prize.

Another result was the callers, who are not always the kind one would expect. Some are American cabin owners who live off the electric grid. Others are owners of luxury apartment buildings in India. Others are developers in China, home to a middle class that is expanding much faster than the nation's sewer systems.

"There's a broad-scale interest," Hoffmann said. "There are much bigger markets out there."

While World Toilet Organization founder Jack Sim called improving access to sanitation in the developing world the "cheapest preventative medicine in the world" at the World Economic Forum on Africa in May, the cause has not been advancing as quickly as some think it should.

The seventh of the United Nations' eight Millennium Development Goals is to cut the number of people living without access to clean water in half between 1990 and 2015. So far, 2 billion people have better access to clean water, but the world is still off track to the goal, according to the latest World Health Organization report on sanitation. It is unlikely to reach it in the next three years.

While China and India have made great strides in providing access to sanitation by decreasing the rate of open defecation, sub-Saharan Africa and most of South Asia lag behind.

One answer to an urgent question Many of these regions also face diminishing water resources in the face of more severe droughts caused by climate change. Waterless toilets do exist but can be less sanitary and, for obvious reasons, much less pleasant.

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Build a Better Toilet to Get Rich and Popular