A variety of selected team led by scientists to enter the competition to create a healthy useful toilet. Some ideas are being worked on by researchers such as creating a toilet that can produce electricity, fuel, charcoal, clean water, salt and microwave-powered toilets.
A team led by Andrew Cotton of Loughborough University has received £ 250,000 are working to transform human waste into charcoal, safe water and salt. To produce energy from the feces, the team will take advantage of the hydrothermal carbonization of impurities are combined and then burning them. Although research is still in its early stages, but they are sure to make a coal-like material through a process that could sustainable.
Bill Gates through his foundation will provide funding of up to $ 42 million for this competition, having previously been held an international conference in Rwanda, about sanitation and hygiene strategy. The competition will select the best projects and suitable for application in August 2012 for a toilet that is environmentally friendly, easy to use and suitable for the global community, especially relating to financial standards.
So far, no proper sanitation has been convicted of the murder of 1.5 Millions lives a year, through it's diarrhea disease.
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Nice topic and nice solution. Also important but not mentioned - besides providing the main health benefit and some energy, the team is removing atmospheric carbon and improving soil productivity. The latter possibly for millennia.
Ron Larson
Black Swan of Biochar
Short a nano material PV / thermoelectrical / ultracapasitating Black swan, What we can do NOW, what I suggested at the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, to the top three EPA officials of north America, A Biochar Black Swan.
Bellow the opening & closing text. A Report on my talk at CEC, and complete text & links are here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/biochar-policy/message/3233
The Establishment of Soil Carbon as the Universal Measure of Sustainability
The Paleoclimate Record shows agricultural-geo-engineering is responsible for 2/3rds of our excess greenhouse gases. The unintended consequence, the flowering of our civilization. Our science has now realized these consequences and has developed a more encompassing wisdom. Wise land management, afforestation and the thermal conversion of biomass can build back our soil carbon. Pyrolysis, Gasification and Hydro-Thermal Carbonization are known biofuel technologies, What is new are the concomitant benefits of biochars for Soil Carbon Sequestration; building soil biodiversity & nitrogen efficiency, for in situ remediation of toxic agents, and, as a feed supplement cutting the carbon foot print of livestock. Modern systems are closed-loop with no significant emissions. The general life cycle analysis is: every 1 ton of biomass yields 1/3 ton Biochar equal to 1 ton CO2e, plus biofuels equal to 1MWh exported electricity, so each energy cycle is 1/3 carbon negative.
Beyond Rectifying the Carbon Cycle;
Biochar systems Integrate nutrient management, serving the same healing function for the Nitrogen and Phosphorous Cycles.
The Agricultural Soil Carbon Sequestration Standards are the royal road for the GHG Mitigation;
The Bio-Refining Technologies to Harvest Carbon.
The photosynthetic "capture" collectors are up and running all around us, the "storage" sink is in operation just under our feet, conversion reactor are the only infrastructure we need to build out. Carbon, as the center of life, has high value to recapitalize our soils. Yielding nutrient dense foods and Biofuels, Paying Premiums of pollution abatement and toxic remediation and the growing Dividend created by the increasing biomass of a thriving soil community.
Since we have filled the air,
filling the seas to full,
soil is the only beneficial place left.
Carbon to the Soil, the only ubiquitous and economic place to put it.
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