Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates takes health and sanitation very seriously.

So seriously that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent the last seven years, and $200 million, on sanitation research.

That has yielded roughly 20 new toilet designs and sludge-processing designs that eliminate harmful pathogens and convert bodily waste into clean water and fertiliser.

All of which sounds kinda gross, but is actually very cool if you take into account the fact that this is the first real toilet innovation in almost 200 years.

BussinessTech reports that, if implemented, the reinvented toilets could “save half million lives and deliver $200 billion-plus in savings”.

Holding a beaker of human excreta that, Gates said, contained as many as 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs, the Microsoft Corp co-founder explained to a 400-strong crowd that new approaches for sterilizing human waste may help end almost 500,000 infant deaths and save $233 billion annually in costs linked to diarrhea, cholera and other diseases caused by poor water, sanitation and hygiene.

One approach to reinventing the loo that Gates finds super interesting comes from the California Institute of Technology. It integrates an electrochemical reactor to break down water and human waste into fertiliser and hydrogen, which can be stored in hydrogen fuel cells as energy.

He should check out the human urine building bricks that they made at the University of Cape Town.

According to Moneyweb, initial demand for the upgraded toilets and sanitation systems will be schools, apartment buildings and public bathroom facilities.

“The value of those outputs exceeds the operating cost,” Gates said. “So you’ll actually be looking for sources of biomass that keep it fully busy.”

Gates, who with wife Melinda has given more than $35.8 billion to the foundation since 1994, said he became interested in sanitation about a decade ago after he stopped working full time at Microsoft.

“I never imagined that I’d know so much about poop,” Gates said in remarks prepared for the Beijing event. “And I definitely never thought that Melinda would have to tell me to stop talking about toilets and fecal sludge at the dinner table.”

If you feel like you’re missing out, you can listen to Gates talking about toilets and faecal sludge in this video:

Hey – if it saves lives and makes public bathrooms less disgusting, I’m totally for this.

[sources:businesstech&moneyweb]