Gates Foundation Flushes Out Winning Toilet Designs
8/20/2012
Bill Gates with a researcher from California Institute of Technology at the Reinvent the Toilet Fair in Seattle on Aug. 14, 2012. (Source: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)
You raise a good issue issue, Naperlou, about the sustainability and support of these new technologies once developed and deployed. Do they need updating and maintenance to stay in working condition? If so, who's trained to fix and support them and where do they get replacement parts or fixes, if they are necessary. Hopefully the engineers and designers working on these types of innovations look at it from the complete lifecycle, from manufacture through maintinability, and in the context of the remote environments. You have to assume they do, but you never know.
This is a good type of philanthropy. On the other hand, getting it out there in general use will be the big challenge. I know a group that was helping to distribute generators that ran on a tropical plant. These could be self contained units and dropped in to an isolated settlement. I don't hear much about it these days. i wonder if these efforts to put technology in places with none can be effective in the long run. Perhaps if they help people get out of the poverty they live in now they will become obsolete. We'll see.
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