HORIZON INTERNATIONAL SOLUTIONS SITE

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” organized by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The program was launched at the AfricaSan conference in Rwanda this week as part of the Foundation’s new $40 million Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene strategy.

“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.

“Most importantly, we must work closely with local communities to develop lasting sanitation solutions that will improve their lives.”

In the project’s first phase, Loughborough’s experts will work to validate certain key principles to design a toilet which is totally different from our existing one; the Loughborough re-invented toilet will recover energy and other valuable resources from human excreta, but will not dispose of any hazardous waste that could threaten human and environmental health.

Loughborough is the only British university to receive this award and is among eight prestigious institutions worldwide to receive a grant for the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, which calls upon experts to prototype, conceptualize and design innovative ways and means of disposing human waste in the developing world. 

Lack of adequate sanitation facilities affects around 40% of the world’s population, with 1.1 billion people worldwide defecating outdoors. Poor sanitation is the major cause of diarrheal disease, the second largest killer of children under five, which claims around 1.5 million lives each year, and is blamed for certain incidents of violence against women and school dropout rates for girls.

The Loughborough research team is led by the Water Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC) in the School of Civil & Building Engineering, and includes colleagues from the Loughborough Design School, Department of Materials, Chemical Engineering and Civil & Building Engineering.

Loughborough’s proposed toilet will transform feces into a highly energetic combustible through a process combining hydrothermal carbonization followed by combustion. The process will be powered by heat generated during the combustion phase of feces processing.

The likely results are converting human waste into useful material for energy generation or soil conditioning, including water for hand-washing and other ablutions.

The toilet must be able to work in both single-family and community environments and should cost just pennies a day per person to run.

“We are extremely delighted to have won this award after a very tough international competition involving colleagues from world-leading universities,” said principal investigator Professor M Sohail. “It is extremely exciting and gratifying that we will be significantly contributing in changing toilets as we have known them for the last hundred years.

“The challenge will be to make them more user friendly and accessible, environment friendly, socially acceptable and financially affordable at a global scale.”

The Loughborough team will deliver the results of this work at meeting in August 2012 where research outcomes will be presented to the Foundation to forecast future developments.

This news is from Loughborough University, 19 July 2011