Watch Bill Gates Drink Water That Was Human Poop Five Minutes Earlier (Video)
The Janicki Omniprocessor sounds like some kind of space-age computerized brain that will usher in a new age of robotics; it looks like a steam-powered cloning machine designed to produce Soylent Green-style food products. What is actually is though, is an ingenious new waste recovery system. Bill Gates recently visited the Omniprocessor to view its conversion of waste to water — and even to drink a glass of the newly purified H2O.
Designed and built by Janicki Bioenergy, the Omniprocessor turns human waste into water and electricity. As Bill Gates explains in this video posted by thegatesnotes, over 2.5 billion people don’t have access to safe sanitation, so the Gates Foundation asked several “brilliant engineers” to help them solve the problem. One of the results of this campaign was the Janicki Omniprocessor.
A potential boon for areas without proper sewer and sanitation systems, the Omniprocessor turns human waste into clean water, electricity and pathogen-free ash. It uses a boiling process to separate water vapor from the sewage and a furnace to create steam power that both runs the machine and sends excess electricity back to the local community.
This simple system is ideally suited for developing countries, since, as Gates points out on his blog GatesNotes, it doesn’t require any complicated infrastructure such as sewer lines and treatment plants. The Omniprocessor meets all U.S. emissions standards and produces clean, drinkable water. Later this year, according to GatesNotes, it will be set up in Dakar, Senegal, as the first step in the pilot project to study how it works in a real community.
Here’s to less waste and more water!
