Table of Contents
Why in NEWS
- The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) presented the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing, China, on November 6, at which innovative toilet technologies were unveiled: these advanced methods process human waste within the toilet, and do not require a sewerage connection. They either separate liquid and solid waste for two processing streams or deal with them as a whole. The end products are plain water and ash.
Unclean toilets
- According to UNICEF, 22.2% of children, or 151 million, under five years were stunted globally in 2017.
Re-invented toilet
- Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has introduced reinvented toilets and Omni processor waste treatment plants at the Reinvented Toilet Expo.
Significance of the innovation?
- Today, 4.5 billion people live without a safe toilet and 892 million people still practise open defecation. A single gram of human faeces can contain 10 million viruses and one million bacteria, but in most countries of the global south, human faeces, on a massive scale, is not being treated safely. In such a situation, untreated human faeces get into our food chain and degrade ecosystems. To make this crisis worse, extreme weather events which include unprecedented droughts and floods pose a major risk to our fragile sanitation systems.
- These “zero emission” processors will end dumping of faecal sludge taken from septic tanks into rivers, lakes, farms and open spaces.
- They can also prevent the death of workers in septic tanks.
Sanitation in India?
- India is further behind on sanitation than on other issues, which is reflected in the high levels of stunting
Measures needs to be taken
- National policy should make it accessible to everyone.
- Money should be invested on Technology
- It is now up to politicians and policymakers to make decisions to adopt them, especially because the Sustainable Development Goal of sanitation and clean water for all by 2030 is not far away
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