The goal of the Gates Foundation is to improve the quality of life for people around the world. Over 2.5 billion people around the world do not have access to safe sanitation, which is why Bill Gates is working with a company that built a sewage treatment machine that can turn human waste into drinkable water. The Omni Processor was built to provide drinkable water for those in need.
The Omni Processor was created by Sedro-Woolley, Washington based company Janicki Bioenergy, which has received funding from the Gates Foundation. The machine turns sewer sludge into clean drinking water, electricity and pathogen-free ash. The machine collects the sludge and moves it up a conveyor belt where it is boiled into water vapor. After the solid sewer sludge dries up, it is fed into a burner to make high-pressure steam that is sent to a generator to make electricity.
The water vapor runs through a cleaning system to make it drinkable. Janicki plans to test out a pilot project of the Omni Processor in Senegal. The Omni Processor runs at a high temperature of 1000 degrees Celsius without leaving a nasty smell. And the Omni Processor meets all the emissions standards set by the U.S. government.
How reliable is the Omni Processor? This video shows Bill Gates drinking water that was in the form of feces about five minutes before:
“I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyer belt and drop into a large bin. They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water,” said Bill Gates in a blog post. "The water tasted as good as any I’ve had out of a bottle. And having studied the engineering behind it, I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe."
In developing countries, many toilets empty into local rivers. Diseases caused by poor sanitation kills around 700,000 children every year. It also prevents many children from fully developing mentally and physically. This issue could be circumvented by building safer ways to get rid of human waste.
Modern sewage plants do not have the same efficiencies as the Omni Processor. Some modern sewage plants turns the wastes into solids and stores it in the desert. Other plants burn waste by using diesel or other procured fuels, thus consuming a lot of energy.
Since the Omni Processor uses a steam engine, it can produce more than enough energy to power itself and provide spare electricity. The next generation of the Omni Processor can handle waste from 100,000 people, produce 86,000 liters of potable water per day and generate a net 250 kw of electricity.
The goal is to make the Omni Processor cheap enough so that entrepreneurs in developing countries want to invest in them and start waste-treatment businesses. Janicki Bioenergy is already working with leaders in Senegal to see how they will pick the most convenient location and connect with the local community. The Omni Processor currently has a cost of about $1.5 million, but it can pay for itself very quickly since it is a very profitable machine. The entrepreneur gets paid for dealing with the sludge (input) and the electricity (output), water (output) and ash (output).
Janicki’s engineers plugged sensors and webcams into the Omni Processor so that they can control it remotely and communicate with the team in Senegal so that it can fix problems if they arise. If the pilot is successful, then Janicki Bioenergy will start looking for more partners in other developing countries right away. Gates said that this is the perfect example of how one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Bill Gates is the richest man in America with a net worth of over $80 billion, according to his FORBES profile. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given away $30 billion since 2000 to fight polio, malaria and ebola. Aside from philanthropy, Gates works as a technology advisor to newly appointed
UPDATED: January 22, 2015:
Bill Gates recently went on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon to have Jimmy Fallon drink water made with the Omniprocessor. Check out the video below:
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