My personal priorities include anti-smoking, education of girls & women, and clean water.

Bill Gates:

This week in Seattle, the foundation is holding a Reinvent the Toilet Fair.

Today I awarded prizes to three universities who responded to our challenge a year ago to come up with solutions for capturing and processing human waste and transforming it into useful resources. The winners included: first place to California Institute of Technology in the United States for designing a solar-powered toilet that generates hydrogen and electricity, second place to Loughborough University in the United Kingdom for a toilet that produces biological charcoal, minerals, and clean water, and third place to University of Toronto in Canada for a toilet that sanitizes feces and urine and recovers resources and clean water.

A special recognition was awarded to Eawag (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology) and EOOS for their outstanding design of a toilet user-interface.

And the Winners of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge Awards are…?

Click PLAY or watch the winning design on YouTube.

(source)

Obviously, that’s too complicated for the developing world. A simple, foolproof design is needed.

But kudos to Bill Gates for pushing this forward.

I first got interested in this topic when visiting Gandhi’s toilet museum in India.