By K. Tran
Imagine your neighbors squatting on the streets. Now imagine them relieving their feces onto the very streets you walk on every day. Quite unsanitary. In this blog post, I will reflect upon my awareness campaign on Bill Gate’s charitable project to reinvent the toilet to improve the sanitation in countries that need it. Our reddit post and in-person talk are quite successful as many people engaged and learned a lot from our infographic and presentation. But first, how did I stumble upon this topic?
I found a video on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah called “Bill Gates Wants to Reinvent the Toilet”. To my interest, I want to see what this billionaire was up to. Is he just wasting money on an extravagant new high tech toilet to meet the comforts of a billionaire’s buttocks? No. To my surprise, it is a humanitarian campaign to help those suffering from unclean conditions, which can cause deadly diseases, especially in the youth.
To summarize the video, the toilet takes up the fecal matter which will be eaten up by microbes. The microbes will release two essential products: water and methane gas. Clean drinking water is a required necessity that is lacking in nations stricken by poverty, and methane gas is a useful energy source. Bill Gates wants to make a new, affordable toilet for those in desperate need.
As for my awareness campaign with J. Mertke, we begin a successful launch. Our poster originally had a poop emoji, which I thought gave some personality to the project. On reddit, our post receives some “constructive criticism”, which prompts us to make “needed” changes in order to make the poster appear more academic.
And so this beautiful revised piece came about:
So we restarted our campaign on reddit, and this is what it looks like:
No further criticisms are made, and we receive many responses in the voluntary survey we provided, which shows 100% of support for this campaign with a sample size of 17 individuals. When we asked, “what did you learn from the infographic?”, one of the direct quotes from our responses is, “Awesome project. Sanitation is needed in poorer areas.” When we asked, “How would you support it? [the cause we are advocating]”, significant responses were, “research it more” or “Donate money”. In summary, people responded that they are now aware of the 2.3 billion people who do not have basic sanitation, and that Gate’s tech is remarkable for solving an important health issue while also solving other problems such as a lack of reusable energy and clean drinking water as described earlier. Finally, this leaves us with the in-person campaign:
At the entrance of the library, we held our signs to attract supporters to our cause. Some of our the people we talked to said, “Cool tech. 2.3 billion people don’t have the basic sanitation to live a full and healthy life. I think it’s awesome that we have more awareness and funding for this cause. Thank you, you guys.” The curious people we engaged with found the issue compelling and the solution outstanding because it is ironic to think a toilet will increase sanitation since it is typically associated with grossness in western culture. It is also ironic to see a toilet reap in monetary benefits such as energy and resources such as clean drinking water. Your mind would probably reject the idea of drinking water that came from a toilet. Not only are these benefits obtained, but also we can use the fecal matter as fertilizer–something that we do not currently do with human waste in the United States. All of this is important because this investment will improve the quality of life in impoverished communities in need, which will lower youth mortality rates and disease contraction rates. Freshwater, a rarity for some, can finally be distributed. This will greatly reduce the contraction of water-borne diseases if a lot of water is produced. Energy, of course, is a needed resource in the developing world to sustain a growing infrastructure. This new toilet also contributes to sustainability because unlike fossil fuels, this bodily released methane gas is not derived below the Earth’s surface, meaning the methane gas is continuously recycled–not changing the methane levels in the atmosphere. It also contributes to sustainability by using the human fecal matter as fertilizer to enrich plant growth, which is a natural substitute for commercial fertilizer (a product that can lead to chemical run-offs into the water. Now for my opinions on this project.
I liked this project because I learned new things that I would otherwise never look into. Infographic and presentational skills are a must for our future engineering careers, which I find is good preparation. Please check out the additional flyers we put out on the bulletin boards!