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Exploring the Water Challenge: Waterless Toilets - Cranfield University
- 5. Lusaka, Zambia Photo: C. Rose
- 7. A household scale toilet which produces clean water and ash Dewatering membranes Screw to remove solids Waterless flush Clean water reservoir Gasifier Holding chamber
Editor's Notes
- It’s crazy that we flush 10L of drinking water down the toilet every time we flush it!
- But we get clean water piped to our homes, and sewage piped away. Imagine if your daily water collection looked more like this – queuing at a water point to collect supplies and having to carry it home. And these guys are lucky – many of them have bikes! Water is too precious to be flushed away with our waste!
- 1.7 billion people use the simplest form of waterless toilet – a pit latrine. But is is hard to keep them hygienic….. while in use……
- ….. And certainly during emptying!
- So BMGF issued their Reinvent the Toilet Challenge
- And this is Cranfield’s response: A household scale toilet which produces clean water and ash. Let me take you through the key points:
- The rotating bowl and scraper are key to make it “flush” without water.
- The membranes – basically sieves with very small holes - allow us to extract pure water from the human waste. The water can be used in the home for washing.
- The gasifier burns the remaining solids.
- We have designed it for the 2.4 billion people who currently lack access to sanitation. But it may well be a technology that is transferred back to high income countries to help solve water scarcity.