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Comment by docbrown | Hacker News Reader

One thing I always thought fascinating about Gates was his candid relationship with feces.

mindfuplay’s comment reminded me of the famous glass of shit water Gates drank from his Omniprocessor project [0].

But within that 2015 article, Gates mentions a long term plan for seweage and shit[1]:

>If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.

>Western toilets aren’t the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn’t feasible in many poor countries.

He also mentions he wrote about toilets before in a 2012 article titled “Reflections on the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge.”[2]

Digging deeper into that article brought me to a PDF from the Gates Foundation outlining grants from their 2011 program: “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge” [3]

————

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVzppWSIFU0

[1]:https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Omniprocessor-From-Po...

[2]:https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Reflections-on-the-Re...

[3]:https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/Documents/wsh-reinvent-the-...

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> "One thing I always thought fascinating about Gates was his candid relationship with feces."

I'd say his relationship is with humans. People are his ends. Feces (i.e., the lack there of) are his means. It's a stunning example of hope (not being lost).

What's most impressive to me is a $200 million investment over 7 years, has the potential to "return" $200 billion __annually__. The lottery seems to break $200M a couple+ times per yer.

Editorial: It's amazing what you can accomplish for the price of a handful of F35 fighter jets.

Just _one_ F35, depending on the variant.

Thx. I looked and couldn't find it mentioned per jet.

That’s because there aren’t any honest prices for a single jet. The R&D cost is so high that how one amortizes that can make 2 orders of magnitude difference in unit cost.

I assumed just what they sold them for per unit to other countries, but maybe they pitched in for R&D? Seems to range from 90-130. Maybe you get 2 if you buy the non navy version.

> Editorial: It's amazing what you can accomplish for the price of a handful of F35 fighter jets.

sadly our investments don't align in the high return ways.

> One thing I always thought fascinating about Gates was his candid relationship with feces.

You pretty much can't be in public health, especially not developing world public health, without developing a preoccupation with poo.

A true engineer follows problems to solutions. Gates is up front about this.

What kills the most people? Of those things, which can be realistically improved?

Western toilets seem to work reasonably well with septic tanks in rural areas. Those don't involve sewer lines or treatment plants.

The issue comes down to cost. As he mentions in the article, the goal is to get to 5 cents a day. Just a basic calculation, a “standard” septic system costs between $1500-4000 to install, and lasts roughly 25 years. Just doing the math on the low end costs brings you to about $0.16 cents a day, 3X the goal Bill Gates is advocating.

Note: this isn’t even taking into account the cost of the toilet itself or any plumbing needed.

Really all you'd need to do to drastically improve things is get them to simply dig a hole for an outhouse instead of the rampant open defecation seen in India and some parts of Africa. We can solve the more complex and exponentially expensive problems of water treatment later. Digging a deep hole gets rid of rampant cholera and incidental exposure.

Basically you've got to learn to crawl before you can run a 10k.

edit: You can get someone who is completely illiterate and cut off from civilization to understand the concept of digging a hole for the shit to go in. This has the added benefit of not requiring advanced manufacturing technology or materials. they just have to dig a hole and move the outhouse top over to the new hole when the old one gets full. This makes them self reliant.

"really all they need to figure out first is to talk to each other before we build mobile cell towers for them"

innovations drive change drive more innovation. I recommend Hans Rosling's talks. There is no such thing as the "Third World" anymore, they're all on various development trajectories. Don't think e.g. Somalia is typical for Africa.

And what I'm saying is a outhouse /is/ a huge innovation to many places in Western Africa and India. It's largely a cultural problem like rampant littering or pollution. One guy digging an outhouse and shitting in it won't make any more difference than a single person recycling. But if enough people do it they will see a huge improvement in public health and infant mortality.

I'd argue that going from shitting in the woods to a well engineered and cheap toilet is a much more attractive step for most people than having them dig outhouses. It's like with the washing mashines - once electrification is there it's one of the first purchases since it's such a quality of life improvement, and this has happened for a majority of the world's population.

I just watched a segment on this (VICE, Vox, other?). In some places, the cultural taboo is cleaning the pit. So in parts of India, with a history of castes, the pits are made impracticably large, to that it never (rarely) needs to be emptied.

The thing is, you don't need to empty it really. You can just fill in the rest with dirt and dig a new pit 10 meters away.

Was it this one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V35Vw29tay0

Well spotted.

Digging a hole is more challenging than you think.

It has to be deep enough, and far enough away from a home, road, water source, food supply, etc. Not all communities have a lot of extra land, so you're talking one or two communal toilets, which need to be large to support a large population, and someone has to maintain them.

If you have the land, you have to have money to construct them, as well as labor. Many households can't afford the $1 (that's one US dollar) construction cost, or the household simply can't perform the labor. In some cases, villages will come together to help fund and construct pit latrines, but these are the exception. Most just put up with the shame and disease of open defecation.

Once you do have them, you have cultural issues like India's manual scavenging problem (http://www.thealternative.in/society/manual-scavenging-thoug...) not to mention you literally have to go out and inform millions of tiny remote villages about why and how to change. It's very hard to get people to change.

Assuming outreach of one week per village, for the 600K censused villages in India, that's 11,506 years to just inform and convince them all to build pit latrines. Even 50 outreach teams would take 250 years. With 500 teams you can cut it down to 23 years.

And with viral growth, 10 years? Once 'everybody is doing it' it may not take as much time. How long did it take for cell phones to reach the most remote villages?

>It has to be deep enough, and far enough away from a home, road, water source, food supply, etc. Not all communities have a lot of extra land, so you're talking one or two communal toilets, which need to be large to support a large population, and someone has to maintain them.

Literally any deep hole practically anywhere is a damn sight better than open defecation straight into the river, on the bank, or all over the streets. And it doesn't take an act of congress to fund it and change building codes, a civil engineer, excavator, and team of union laborers to get this stuff done like it does in the west. You just need someone who is personally motivated and determined and a shovel ideally. like this guy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi

All you need is one person who knows that digging a hole would keep his kid from getting sick and dying and you'd have more trouble trying to stop him from digging that hole for an outhouse.

When that clicks for them. That their kid or wife or husband wouldn't have died if they bothered to dig an outhouse, they will be doing the work and telling everyone they know and also nagging people till their ears fell off when they catch someone shitting in the street.

Doesn’t really work for China though. Plenty of public toilets around, and people (mostly children) will still take a shit in the street.

Hell, I was in Chongqing a couple months ago and saw a teenager literally unzip, in full view of everyone, and pea on (on, not into) a recycling bin. Next to a god damn public toilet.

In the middle of a shopping center.

Near a police officer.

A lot of people just don’t care.

If you gotta go, I guess?

I've seen people poop on the train platform in NJ. Really crazy, but Newark does not open the bathrooms until 7-8AM. So when you're waiting for the 3AM train to DC... what you gonna do?

Hold it.

Seriously. I can barely hold a piss with age.

We are talking about someone defecating on a train station platform.

I've a good 'decent' friend, who had to take a shit on the station platform. Because there was no other option available at the time. Some people can not hold their bowels. I'm sure he'd have surrendered to the station toilets if they were open. UK trains and stations frequently have shut or out of order toilets. I've foolishly hung on, thinking the train will be an option, only to discover it's a no can do. I'll go alfresco every time given the opportunity these days.

Still gross, but, does human urination spread any diseases?

Taking a shit in the street is perhaps not such a problem if you clean it up afterwards? Culture is hard to change, but perhaps it can be accommodated?

Oh, they're just like San Franciscans.

Except San Francisco has like zero public toilets.

> the goal is to get to 5 cents a day

Anyone know which country is this considering?

Septic system lasts for 40 years. But installing a new septic is expensive. $4000 is in the low end

Where do you think the poop goes when it gets pumped out?

In the sailing community more and more people are using composting toilets: https://farmingmybackyard.com/diy-composting-toilet/

As long as it is disposed of safely (properly composted), the cost here is the composting material.

Most properly sized and installed septic tanks do not ever need to be pumped out. They compost on their own and the excess water seeps out underground.

this was contrary to my city-dweller's understanding, so i did some quick wiki-reading and it seems like the reality is somewhere between you and GP's statement? i.e. they do biodegrade waste via anaerobic bacteria, but non-degradable sludge has to get pumped out every few years.

>every few years

Every few decades for a properly sized and properly functioning system.

Septic tank owner here. I own a single family home, maybe larger setups are different. The recommendation from the installer is that it is pumped and inspected every 3-4 years.

> The recommendation from the installer is that it is pumped and inspected every 3-4 years.

That sounds about right if the goal is to keep a system that's not properly functioning (not enough microbes to break down solids) from filling up to the point of causing problems. You won't go wrong if you follow that advice but depending on what goes into your septic (do you have a garbage disposal, do you do laundry with bleach, number of people in household, etc) you may be able to go an order of magnitude longer. Recommending a system be pumped every 3-4yr is like a 3k oil change, it's excessive in the overwhelming majority of use cases but it will make more money for whoever does the work and not cause a system to fail in a way that comes back to bite whoever installed it.

The manual for the original Nintendo Entertainment System said "Do not operate continuously for more than 15 minutes."

Sometimes legal departments force them to include those recommendations in order to err on the side of "absurdly overcautious." And sometimes the recommendations are merely prudent! I'm not saying you can wait longer, just that installers may have a motivation to exaggerate.

But unlike an NES system, if your septic tank develops a problem you now have liquid and solid waste flooding your yard and home, and your toilets, sinks, and showers are useless until it's fixed.

I feel like the failure mode for electronics is "randomly catches on fire" which can be just as devastating, if not moreso. Nobody has ever died because their toilet backed up. Their house burning down in the middle of the night is a different story.

People die from diseases caused by sewage, but it's usually a downstream issue.

My grandparents had there's installed in 1983. I think it was a somewhere between 700-1000 gallons. The toilets finally stopped flushing properly in 2010. It was because the tank was completely full of sludge. They got it pumped, and I guess it'll go another 20+ years now...

Your city dweller’s habits compel you to throw fat and oil down the drain. These need very high temperature to compost. But then you are also throwing chlorine and ammonia based cleaning agents, which greatly inhibits organic life.

If you let the fat and oil solidify at room temp and dispose of them in the trash, and if you use regular soap in the recommended amount, and if you septic tank additive once in a while, you will be tearing the problem at the source, and will only need to take care of the tank when it’s time to replace it in 40 years.

This is why you see a jar full of bacon fat and the like in lots of rural homes. They aren't saving it to cook with, they are collecting it to throw out with the trash instead of sludging up the drain and septic system. People are much more careful about what they flush down the drain when they know they will be responsible to fix it if they cause issues.

For the apocalyptic end results of lots of city dwellers flushing non-biodegradables down the drain, Google "fatberg" - only if you have a strong stomach.

It depends on how the tank is setup and the drainage system it has.

Septic tanks are not closed systems they are open and intended to provide an environment that can produce a bio-reactor while maintaining drainage through the soil.

Many good systems don’t need to be drained other than every few decades in fact good systems would outlast the tank and the filtering substrate it’s built on so when the time comes you need to dig out the tank and the gravel and other filtering particulate it used because that is what has degraded.

The problem with septic tanks is that they don’t scale we’ll have one on a large property in the middle no where that 5 people use and it’s a great solution have a bunch of them and worse over use one in particular and you get a polluting mess.

But septic tanks also don’t solve the other problem with western toilets and that is the amount of water they consume which is simply unfeasible for many developing regions.

TLDR; if the septic tank was installed and sized correctly it will outlast you even without pumping it, but it’s not a solution the reason we don’t use them in cities is because they don’t and can’t scale with urban population densities.

Also, some US states are encountering issues with bio contamination in their aquifers and as water issues become more prevalent (perennial droughts in some states shrinking aquifers making them less resilient to contamination; perennial flooding in others moving the water tables closer to septic tanks and making them more prone to contamination), the requirements to isolate septic tanks from local ecologies will only grow (ie, increasingly more counties will require to close them, watertight protect them, require them to be regularly pumped moving forward, and/or replace them with a connection to nearby sewage systems).

Yes the ground water level, soil permutability, distance to water sources etc. has a lot of implications on what sceptic system you can implement and I would bet that many tanks are put in without much regulation or oversight.

Other areas like those in which ground temperatures drop below freezing for long period of time might also require tight tanks and constant pumping since the cold may stop the reaction in the tank so it would surprise me if tanks in places like say N. Dakota would be pumped year before winter to prevent them from freezing shut and overflowing.

Actually, a proper septic tank (according to EU regulations) has to be water-tight and be emptied regularly. Many beaches on the Mediterranean loose their health pass occasionally due to nearby overbuilding and improper septic tanks.

That's not the case in the US.

At least, it's not the normal case in the U.S. We call that a "holding tank", not a septic tank.

That's not a "proper" septic tank. That's just a holding tank. The word 'septic' alludes to the fact that you are promoting putrefaction to decompose the contents.

RVs have holding tanks that must be emptied. Thus, they aren't called "septic tanks".

But I'm sure the term is used loosely.

However, if the system isn't maintained it often needs replaced at a large expense. Most homeowners don't know how to inspect and don't bother to hire someone knowledgeable.

Our local township has an ordinance where every residential sewage system (10k residents, not sure how many systems that is) has to be pumped out and inspected by a certified sewage hauler. This way, the homeowner knows about and is required to make simple repairs before the entire system fails.

That makes no sense. What happens to the solid material?

What solid material? Fecal matter, toilet paper, small food particles, etc break down in a septic tank.

I suppose there will be very small amounts of minerals that don't break down but they are insignificant.

Where does all the solid waste go? Unless you mean they are big enough where they'd need replacement before needing to be pumped.

They do when they're kept up and in good condition. When there is abundant fresh water.

But when they're not kept up. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...

The silly thing is, that in it's very basic form, if you divide liquid and solid wastes at the point of exit, solid waste composts easily and readily, with some carbon additives and air. It is very low tech. Not so good in flood prone areas (without additional acre), and one has to be environmentally aware to say the least. But education is a winner here. I'm tied into a shitty contract with a plant owner that is operating illegally. And I've looked at alternatives, but the simplest really is just a bucket that is carried out to the garden. Posh compost toilets are just buckets in chambers that are well ventilated. If you have the space, you can incorporate the chambers into the house and preferably have some ability to rotate. Otherwise it's a case of emptying in a rodent proof heap. You can always compost twice. At least you can then use the waste. Rather than having to pump out sludge that may contain other household contaminants.

A surgeon who was a missionary in nepal said he'd have had far gteater impact on health by digging ditches, because of open sewers. He didn't, because it was more important to him to be a surgeon.

Seems Bill Gates is trying to improve the whole system, not just some technical aspect. Which also differentiated MS from most technical companies.

> because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants

How do you think economies grow? Job creation at this scale has to be funded out of tax receipts and bonds. The problem is managing the corruption (note: one must assume there are corrupt actors. The trick is managing them).

"Job creation" by itself isn't a very noble goal. Creating hamster wheels for humans to run on is comically cruel and pointless.

Life is a hamster wheel for humans. But, yes, it's a dumb idea.

Fundamentally I agree with this, it's very inefficient and wasteful of resources, although I sometimes wonder whether it's the only practical way to provide welfare in places where politics / prevalent ideology oppose direct social policies.

It can also be argued that charities providing all those third world country with basic supplies, like food, clothes or drugs, actually ruin their economies. It's simply impossible for local producers of said goods to compete on price with charity organization that gives those away for free.

If a corporation would try to do that in US, it would be called price dumping and trigger antimonopoly lawsuit against them, but somehow, when it's done to poor African countries we consider it OK, and even expect them to be gratefull for it.

EDIT: I think that China does much better job helping them by making actual investments in their economies, building railroads, factories, etc. You might question their intentions, but you cannot question the results.

Have you ever given someone a job? My experience has been people crave purpose. Sometimes more than life itself.

>> because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants

>How do you think economies grow?

sometimes not by taking debt for public infrastructure they have no way of maintaining

If you watch the video properly you will see that he did not drink the water

> * If you watch the video properly you will see that he did not drink the water*

Then what's he doing at 1:52?

Although granted, the Janicki Omniprocessor website says that it doesn't quite produce drinking water quality.

I don't see him gulping the water down. As a matter of fact, the water barely touched his lips.

>>Western toilets aren’t the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn’t feasible in many poor countries.

Then build it! No magic tricks there.

I think, this is the most infuriating trait I see in all Silicon Valley "sophisticated person" types.

Build what? What trait?

Infrastructure: power stations, grid, water supply, sewage, roads, garbage removal.

Without that, you have no functioning cities, and without that, no modern day economy.

> What trait?

The believes in all kinds of trickery. No will to deal with issues the straight way. Such people spend more time looking for a shortcut, than dealing with an issue at hand.

Look: Mr. Gates spent $200m on a magic toilet that is nowhere to be found. That's enough to build 5 small electric power stations, and 5 small sewage treatment plants in a third world country.

How many people lives were improved with magic toilet, and how much by building more infrastructure.

> Look: Mr. Gates spent $200m on a magic toilet that is nowhere to be found. That's enough to build 5 small electric power stations, and 5 small sewage treatment plants in a third world country.

There was a nice movie about an engineer that was in Thailand (not sure about the country) to build a dam. long story short a civil war start in the country and he is a main target because infrastructure investment from outside to build an infrastructure you cannot maintain only puts you in a death spiral of debt.

It’s pure pragmatism. There aren’t the resources to build and maintain a sewage network everywhere it is required. Having a more self contained, affordable solution is better for many places.

I'm not a civil engineer but I do work with them occasionally. There are numerous challenges with this, probably the hardest is water pressure: if the water pressure cannot be guaranteed then poor plumbing can send waste water back into the water main, which is a really big problem.

I also assume that to ensure water pressure involves electricity - a lot of poorer countries do not have a constant or reliable electricity supply.

Building this sort of infrastructure is a massive engineering task and it can take years to complete a project like this. It requires skilled engineers and labour. During that time, people will die because it's not done yet.

In conclusion, I think Gates and co have made a good investment.

>Building this sort of infrastructure is a massive engineering task

>It requires skilled engineers and labour

Exactly, and there are no tricks around that are known to solve that, other than to engage in massive infrastructure projects. A very simple thing.

There are tricks around known to solve this, such as building intermediate solutions like what Gates proposes to do.

When you have a serious issue in production that can be fixed with a global variable in 5 minutes or spending a day correctly planning and implementing a fix that routes the data correctly, what do you pick? I'd hope doing the first thing and replacing it with the second.

It's that sort of decision, only people die if you don't move in time.

Yes, the magic toilet took a possibly a decade to make, and I bet will never ever see real world deployment.

In the same time, most banal sewers and septic tanks take days to build.

>I also assume that to ensure water pressure involves electricity - a lot of poorer countries do not have a constant or reliable electricity supply.

Today water pressure in the western world is mostly generated by running finely controlled electric pumps constantly, but it wasn't too long ago that water towers were used everywhere to maintain water pressure. The advantage of a water tower is that you can run an inaccurate oversized pump occasionally to fill up the reservoir on top of the tower, and gravity does the rest of the work.

Of course building a tower capable of holding many tons of water is a comparably complex civil engineering task and is costly in materials.

>Of course building a tower capable of holding many tons of water is a comparably complex civil engineering task and is costly in materials.

In most cases it's not. You park a ground level tank on one of the taller hills in town.

That's completely forgetting a lot of these areas are water stressed now let alone what they are projected to be in the near future

Send them Brazilian soap operas then.

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