The University of Colorado Boulder is developing a toilet powered by solar to help 2.5 billion people globally that lack safe and sustainable sanitation. The self-contained, waterless toilet designed and built using a $777,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be unveiled in India.
The invention has the capacity of heating human waste for sterilization creating biochar, a porous charcoal that can be used in crop yields and to sequester carbon dioxide.The project is part of the Gates Foundation’s “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge,” an effort to develop a next-generation toilet that can be used to disinfect liquid and solid waste while generating useful end products, both in developing and developed nations.
The toilet has eight parabolic mirrors that focus concentrated sunlight reflecting it onto a stamp on a quart-sized glass that is attached to eight bundles of fiber optic cables. The solar energy generated is transferred to the cables that can heat up the reaction chamber to over 600 degrees Fahrenheit to treat the waste material, disinfect pathogens in both feces and urine, and produce char. Test results reveal that the cables can each produce between 80 and 90 watts of energy with the entire system delivering up to 700 watts of energy into the reaction chamber.
The CU-Boulder team is now applying for phase two of the Gates Foundation “Reinvent the Toilet” grant to develop a field-worthy system to deploy in a developing country based on their current design.
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