SEATTLE — Bill Gates is turning his penchant for cutting-edge invention to the most unglamorous of devices: the toilet.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Tuesday launched a program aimed at “reinventing the toilet” — providing $42 million in grants to create and test new approaches to improve sanitation in the developing world.
The projects were being announced at a conference in Rwanda.
The sanitation revolution, which started in the 18th century with the introduction of the flush toilet and sewers, “has saved more lives than any innovation in the history of public health or medical science,” said Frank Rijsberman, director of the foundation’s Water, Sanitation and Hygiene initiative.
It also boosted economic growth by reducing waterborne diseases such as cholera and severe diarrhea.
But that transformation reached only one-third of the world, and the problem has only grown worse.
About 40 percent of people still have no access to safe, sanitary toilets, and 1 billion practice open defecation, according to the World Health Organization. Food and water tainted with human waste cause diseases that lead to the deaths of about 1.5 million children a year.
The new grants aim to develop affordable latrines, promote sanitation in communities and find new ways to capture and store waste, processing it into energy, fertilizer and even fresh water.
For an organization that often looks to vaccines to solve health problems, the focus on sanitation moves closer to the root of the problem.
“It’s not a very popular topic,” foundation co-chairwoman Melinda Gates said in a recent interview, “but in terms of really changing people’s lives,” sanitation is fundamental.
In one project that received funding, a team from Stanford University proposed building a system in Nairobi, Kenya, that would turn human waste into a charcoal used for carbon capture and storage and would process 2 tons of waste daily.
A team from Switzerland aims to construct a functioning model of a toilet that turns urine into water for cleansing.
