Many people are sick with digestive problems and many children die of gastrointestinal illness caused by a lack of access to clean potable water, a lack of access to sanitation, and a lack of access to clean toilets or sanitary products to wipe; sanitary napkins, tampons, pads or other consumables used for hygiene, like soap dispensers & soap & a sink with running water to wash hands after using the toilet, to remove fecal coliform & other pathogenic bacteria that can be on the hands after wiping the anus with toilet paper for example!
A dry toilet, when nearly everyone knows that urine is a liquid & that many kinds of feces or poo contain moisture from the water content. How can the toilet be dry. Most people have used a portable potty, vertically oriented plastic boxes with a urinal on the left & toilet seat over a large tank filled with blue fluid into which human waste excreted. Trucks deliver these portable plastic toilets, usually 3 or more to large public events like concerts so that people can use a bathroom where official bathroom facilities are not available. Some public parks have portable plastic bathrooms near the edges of the sports fields. Construction sites typically contain at least one & often two portable toilets.
Most of the portable bathrooms that I have used also have a locking door with an occupancy display on the outside to let other people know if the unit is in use or not. Most of them also contain a hand pump based hand sanitizer unit so that you can wash your hands with the alcohol based slightly thickened sanitizing gel after using the toilet! This makes it possible for these toilets to operate without water, aside from the blue fluid added during servicing, when the contents of the waste tank are emptied & new sanitation fluid added to reset the portable toilet. This means that with a little more tech, like a solar panel on the roof, a motor operated fan, some liquid pumps & science based waste treatment devices, a greatly enhanced portable toilet possible, as in it can be feasibly made & sold as a premium product in medium volumes, of the "Best newest portable toilet"
Bill gates worked with many others & given generous funding to developing a low cost toilet & sanitation solution to emerging economies, rapidly developing economies in Africa, India & South America for example. The "Toilet Race" to develop a self contained toilet system that can run on a small solar panel, with no water input, that produces sanitary carbon by pyrolytic hot thermal decomposition of the feces, water vapor compression distillation to remove purified fresh water from the urine, and liquid nutrient fertilizer output made from nutrient rich urine components!
The self contained automatic sanitary fertilizer making & fresh water producing toilet device must also be low cost, easy to service with basic tools & without any special knowledge, very easy to fix & take apart & intuitive to service & repair in the field, without any special tooling or special equipment, without manuals or instructions, as easy as possible to work on, to assemble, to build, to copy & make more of by cloning the design.
The goal to make eco-friendly durable high technology toilets by the million that actually improve sanitation, using tiny amounts of solar power made with a solar panel to produce solid fertilizer from poo & liquid fertilizer from pee & fresh water from water extracted from the urine. This unit must also operated without filters or consumables, not requiring spares, or washable reusable well made filters that can be easily remade using local materials if needed. By integrating a "rinse" function, the use of toilet paper can be eliminated, the rinse water made using vapor compression distillation from the urine, energized by solar energy from a PV module mounted & wired up nearby!
Fresh water wasted by toilets a major problem because there are nearly 9 billion people alive at the same time worldwide. Each person producing more than 70 kg of waste excrement annually, that's a ton of poo & pee when you multiply by the population, many hundreds of millions tons. Biogas, fertilizer, plastics, fragrances, coatings, lubricants, soil building media & other cool products can be made from human waste using applied technologies like vapor compression distillation, vacuum distillation, activated carbon filtering of pharmaceutical metabolites. The majority of the important nutrients for fertilizer present in the urine, so capturing the poo & pee in separate streams one way to isolate liquid & solid waste, like they do for astronauts on the ISS or international space station. A lot of water can be recovered from human waste, purified & then used for irrigation of cultivated plants in gardens and farms.
Most of Earth's fresh water frozen as ice near the South Pole, if it melted that could raise sea levels 60 meters or ~200 feet. Given that much of Earth's human population lives within 10km or 6 miles of a coastal border between land & sea, that means a lot of cities, homes, buildings & streets would be deeply covered by sea water. That gives ample reason to develop a waterless toilet, dry toilet, toilet that extract purified water from urine, turning urine metabolites into liquid fertilizers & making carbon for soil building by pyrolysis of feces, excreted by the machine as bricks, pucks or powder. The automatic waterless toilets must be able to run on DC electricity from a small solar PV panel or array of small PV modules, perhaps 1kW of PV or less, charging up capacitors or super-capacitors or ultra capacitors or long life rechargeable LiFePO4 batteries, that have peak power output capable of powering the process stages. Thats a hard challenge, to make something like that cheaply, thats easy to fix, thats durable, reliable, sanitary, completely automatic, that produces clean water, fertilizer & soil carbon as outputs, all using just a small amount of captured solar energy, urine & feces as inputs.
Fresh water is rare & pressure on it from chip making & agricultural use threaten high costs & limited availability of potable water in the future. Integrated circuit manufacturing in chip fabs like those operated by Intel or TSMC make use of ultra purified super clean water that is required to rinse away impurities that form during the different wafer processing stages. IC manufacturing one of the most complicated physical chemical processes of any used in industry, especially the deep UV mirror lithography nickel mask pattern reflection mirror bounce optics ASML machines at TSMC that make the latest SOC for the newest Apple Watch, M2 chip, iPhone, iPad, AirPods or similar. The smaller chipset features enable best in class power efficiency which is essential for products with tiny capacity lithium polymer batteries like the Apple Watch or AirPods. In smartphones, smaller chipset features enable better chipset performance for mobile gaming, 5G NR mobile broadband, amazingly detailed cameras for photography or for capturing videos with your smartphone! The smartphone is the camera that everyone always has with them, thus highly powerful as a imaging tool since you always have it, its easy to use, you already use it for 30 other things, like doing photographic color analysis of your urine in glass jars to estimate your hydration, like I do; noticing that the B-vitamin make an alien green color in the urine that results some hours after taking a multi-B vitamin :) People accept these toxic industrial processes because of the value of the products & the widespread popularity & global sales of these high technology information technology products, even if making them wastes fresh water or contaminates fresh water with complicated chemical pollutants.
Water born diseases caused by human waste mixing with rain water & running off was a major problem in Europe during the Middle Ages as the common practice in England before the Big Stink, was to take a bucket or jug that was urinated into & defecated into & pour it into the street, through an open window. With so many people living in London, the runoff filled the local rivers with human waste. On a hot summer day when this river was at a low point for the year, the human waste runoff was producing a dense thick foul stench that caused the upper class in parliament to set off a "space race" of sanitation improvements & toilet development & highly diffused installation in most homes & businesses with a national campaign & funding to get the clean toilet sanitation revolution moving!
Today, in India, it's still common for people to relieve themselves outside, near the street or in a local ditch. The untouchable class comes along & deals with it. People give the untouchables bottles of water, leftover food & sometimes throw money coins at them as a form of thanks & payment for the sanitation service. Breaking with tradition, a member of the elite class devoted himself to improving cleanliness & sanitation with toilets installed all around India, toilet busses specifically for women. Women are disproportionately negatively impacted by a lack of access to clean safe toilets. This gives rise to sexual violence & bacterial infections that are uncomfortable, painful, itchy, burning, like a UTI or urinary track infection, that no one wants to experience.
I know about UTI because I have had a UTI & it was before I understood that poor diet choices had caused such elevations to my blood glucose levels, that sugar exiting my kidneys was spilling over into my bladder & urethra, where bacteria were proliferating by eating the surplus sugars that are not supposed to be in urine, and only end up there because of persistent high blood sugar levels typical of untreated pre diabetes or Type 2 diabetes, which I had unwittingly developed. It would take me a few more years, feeling tired, sore, sick, with wounds that would not heal, to actually test my blood sugar, HbA1c red blood cell oxidation & to thus seek medical attention, which resulted in a prescription for both lisinopril & metformin, which I still take daily with my vitamins when eating a meal.
I drink too much water, coffee in the morning & am generally "over" hydrated. Having published works on the negative effects of dehydration on kidney & brain cells, I have a behavioral bias to drink too much water. More specifically research & writing about the formation of kidney stones & dehydration increasing the risk of developing kidney failure that requires costly dialysis sessions that last hours each, 3x per week, for thousands of dollars per month out of pocket. The human brain can also be damaged by dehydration, especially during sleep where metabolites are not flushed out effectively, leaving behind toxic chemical waste that is implicated as a basis or causal factor of demential & Alzheimers diseases, but also ADD & ADHD in children & adolescents who are not drinking enough water.
Not withstanding the low cost carbohydrates, sugars, and starches that comprise the foundation of the SAD or standard American diet, otherwise known as diseases of civilization or western diets that cause obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, & other metabolic syndrome disorders. People in America do not drink enough water & they are stressed out by an economy thats been hit with increasing currency inflation, COVID19 related closures, worker shortages, supply chain interruptions, natural hazards & disasters & monetary pressure from helping the Ukraine with money & munitions to fight against Russia, plus many other factors like the 24/7/365 news cycle, media bombardment & information overload & many Americans do it to themselves with negative ideas & negative perspectives, feeling sad, depressed, stressed out, frustrated, angry, socially divided, spies from foreign countries posing as Americans on poplar social media platforms publishing divisive postings that cause social division, social anxiety, fear of socialization or interaction with other people & other psychological, emotional & thus mind body connected physiological imbalances or dysfunction that are the basis for many diseases, like cancers. Add in the chemical assaults from pesticides, pollutants, heavy metals & other poisonous & toxic substance in common foods. Then you have injuries, accidents, physical sports trauma, falls, spills, hits, mechanical damage to the bones & joints of the neck, back, knees, ankles, hips, and feet. Many autoimmune disorders consider idiopathic or without known cause in western medicine because they originate from imbalances & stresses that knock homeostasis out of balance, happing in the patients mind, mental, psychological & emotional processes that if imbalanced cause many autoimmune diseases, like bitterness & unforgiving! Negative emotions translate into disease formation via the mind body connection firmly establish in formal science!
Climate change, increasing food & fuel prices, closing retail, e-commerce monopolies like Amazon.com fueled by Prime memberships that hook people into shopping online for things they have limited odds' of even finding at a local store for example! Drunk drivers, crime, scams & more, all regularly discussed on the news. When people take that kind of negative information into their minds it harms their mind & the mind body connection means it harms their bodies physiology & this is well established in science & medicine.
Furthermore emotions affect hormone levels, such that strong negative emotions cause radical imbalances, like chronically increasing cortisol levels! There are many sources of stress in the family, at work, at school, online, on the phone, on the internet, with friends & other family members. Plus a lot of American's feel isolated & lonely, with no sense of community, socially divided by walls of secrecy behind which strange things are happening that are unnatural, like insomnia, because they can not relax, they are so stressed they have acid reflux & heart burn, acidic from constantly being stressed out! They know that fresh water resources are being polluted needlessly & they are irritated that nothing is being done about it. Most people assume correctly that they are not being represented by governments, that the official in government pander to the special interest who bribe them using every means imaginable off the books & unofficially to maintain impunity to legal issues related to bribery, such that the politicians actually represent special interests, the profit interests of large corporations like Amazon that employ more than 1,151 lobbyists in Washington DC! It seems that more than fresh water is being wasted in America. A lot of recyclables are thrown into the trash, & trash dumps thereby, things that could have been profitably recycled like glass & aluminum.
So how can we expect Americans to focus on improving sanitation worldwide? You can start by watching this encouraging video about it on YouTube https://youtu.be/QKGDl_suBNI
I covered a lot of issues here. Here is the point. Every big change in society starts with a small powerful idea, like water conservation. You can radically reduce shower water us by getting wet rinsing off, then turning the water off as you soap up, then turn the water off & warm rinse, just like they do in the NAVY aboard submarines. This rinse, dry soap, rinse clean, saves up to 80% more water than leaving the water running the whole time while showering. Water saving in a home toilet can be accomplished by letting yellow mellow, so that if multiple people take a leak at night, no flushing, it just becomes a bowl of urine, then in the morning, when someone goes #2, its time to flush! This can reduce night time toilet flushing water waste by many tens of gallons per person, per day! Add that up worldwide! I also pee into plastic bottles, high capacity bottles that can contain up to 10 urinations, then I pour that urine on plants nearby to fertilize them. Shhh, don't tell anyone! Joking aside, the plants are also watered by an irrigation system & I am the only person doing that out of the thousands of people living in my complex. I noticed that the one tree I have been giving my pee, is doing better than the others like it nearby. Probably because it has not rained in over a month, and the extra water from my pee collection bottle helps to water that tree effectively :) I know that scientists working at the South Pole & many package delivery drivers are peeing in plastic bottles too! It's not just me. I started peeing in a plastic jug in the garage as a teenager, my dad gave me the idea, he did it too. We avoided flushing the toilet thousands of times by doing this. That keeps the toilet cleaner longer too!
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