SEATTLE, Jan. 7 (UPI) — Fiji bottled water claims to come from an artisan well in Viti Levu. Deer Park was originally bottled from a spring near the Maryland and Virginia border. But if Microsoft founder Bill Gates has his way, scores of people around the world will enjoy refreshment from a more unexpected, and common, natural resource — human fecal matter.
Processed using technology developed as part of the Gates Foundation’s Omniprocessor project, the human excrement also produces electricity and ash, allowing the Omniprocessor to power itself and surrounding communities.
As for the water itself, gates said it “tasted as good as any I’ve had out of a bottle.”
“And having studied the engineering behind it, I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”
The Omniprocessor was built by Washington-based engineering firm Janicki Bioenergy. It was there Gates enthusiastically sampled the projects’ water.
“I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyer belt and drop into a large bin,” Gates described on his personal blog.
“They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water.”
Gates sees the project as offering hope for under-hydrated third-world communities where modern toilets are an impossibility due to the required physical infrastructure of a citywide sewage system. Janicki will open a pilot facility in Senegal later in 2015 with hopes of attracting investors from around the world.
Roughly 1,400 children under five die each day from diseases enabled by lack of drinking water according to UNICEF, a number Gates hopes the Omniprocessor will cut into, if it attracts the attention of private investors.
“If things go well in Senegal, we’ll start looking for partners in the developing world. For example I think it could be a great fit in India, where there are lots of entrepreneurs who could own and operate the processors, as well as companies with the skill to manufacture many of the parts.”