Bill Gates drinks water made from feces, proves his tech works

Bill Gates has a lot of money. He could probably drink fancy sparkling water every day for the rest of his life, but instead he’s drinking water that was made from recycled human waste. Why?

Gates has long been interested in developing new economical and safe waste-deposit systems. For years now the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been hosting events such as the “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge” to transform human waste into some useful resource, such as energy or water.
 
Recently, he took a tour of engineering firm Janicki Bioenergy. The company’s goal falls into the overall hope of the foundation- to develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, prevent many of deaths related to poor waste management and help more children grow up healthy.

Janicki is working on a project called the Omniprocessor which safely deposits and repurposes human waste so it doesn’t end up in less fortunate countries’ water supplies.

How it works

The Omniprocessor operates at 1800°F and uses a steam engine to burn sewer “sludge” and transform it into clean drinking water, electricity and ash.

 
The “sludge”, as the company calls it, is first boiled. During the boiling process the water vapors are separated from the solids. The solids become dry and can be fed into a fire to create high pressure steam that is sent to a steam engine that drives the generator to create the electricity to power the processor and even creates excess electricity that can be sent back to power a community.

The water vapor that was created in the boiling process is run through a cleaning system until it produces the cleanest water possible.

Skeptical? Watch Bill Gates drink water from the Omniprocessor that was human waste just five minutes earlier.
 

Gates explains more about the two billion people around the world that are suffering the consequences of poor sanitation and details his visit to Janicki in his blog post: From Poop to Potable.