Bill Gates's High-Tech Toilet Expo, and How Its Attendees Imagine Solving the Toilet Problem

Can an engineer's way of thinking finally solve a public-health problem?

Some of the world's richest, smartest and most powerful people sent representatives to Beijing last week to imagine what it is like to go to the toilet in a poor region — and how to fix it.

On November 6, a toilet expo opened, and Bill Gates came to give a speech showing off seven years of results from the Gates Foundation's Reinvent the Toilet Challenge.

The English name was plain enough — the Reinvented Toilet Expo — while the Chinese name it was given translates as "New-Generation Toilet Expo." The China Council for the Promotion of International Trade and the China Chamber of International Commerce were both partners. Gates made a point of mentioning China's toilet revolution since 2015, saying it "reflects China's determination to accelerate the building of safe sanitation." The day before, he had met government officials and spoken at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai.

The professors came too. Sixteen projects from universities and research institutes, including ones led by professors at the University of Toronto and Duke University, had all been funded by the Gates Foundation. A few Chinese companies were there as well, among them CRRC.

The Gates Foundation took over three floors — more than 3,000 square meters — of the China Guardian Art Center on Wangfujing Street, inside Beijing's East Second Ring Road. The building is also the headquarters of the parent company of the Guardian auction house; a huge reproduction of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains is set into one wall. It was designed by Ole Scheeren, who designed CCTV's headquarters tower with Rem Koolhaas.

The toilets and toilet models had been laid out with care. Exhibitors wanted visitors to understand how the technology worked as fast as possible.

The biggest spot, at the entrance, belonged to Duke University. Its booth stood a meter off the ground, with a sit-down toilet and a squat toilet on top and a large treatment system underneath. Using red and blue pipes, Duke showed how a mixture of urine, feces and sanitary pads travels through the system: first split into solids and liquids, then disinfected and burned to kill the parasites, and finally discharged as dry fecal waste.

On the second floor, Cranfield University's booth had drawn a small group of Chinese visitors. It was showing a small new-generation toilet for household use. The presenters had put out two models: the first looked no different from an ordinary toilet, while the second had a fully transparent shell that left every part visible, with colored indicator lights on different sections.

Next to the model was a control panel. Press a button and you could follow the lights as they changed and watch, as if in a science documentary, how feces are separated, burned and disposed of inside this small toilet. The project's staff told visitors that more than one exhibitor was working on similar technology, and that their own breakthrough was the urine-separation system: wastewater passing through a membrane generates the electricity the toilet needs to run itself.

One woman kept circling the toilet, question after question: "No water?" "No sewer?" "No power supply?" The guide explained again and again that the toilet is meant for places short of water and without sewage treatment — not only remote, undeveloped areas, but often cities too. The visitor said she had once lived in a Beijing hutong, where she and her family relied for a time on a chamber pot.

Besides small standalone toilets for the home, there were large ones for public spaces. The Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) had set up an outdoor toilet that looked like a module from a space station. A member of the project walked visitors around it and explained that this was a modular new-generation toilet: like Lego bricks, it could be built into a single-unit toilet or an open-air washstand.

The guide, speaking English with a Nordic accent, opened and moved the toilet's modules as she talked. Separation plus incineration turns feces and urine into a dry residue much like fertilizer, which piles up on a tray inside one of the modules; someone pulls the drawer open now and then and clears it out.

A team led by Yu-Ling Cheng, a chemistry professor at the University of Toronto, showed the Sankoya toilet system. Waste is separated into solids and liquids, each sent into a low-temperature smoldering furnace that kills the pathogens. Sankoya can deal with feces on the spot within 24 hours, without any connection to a sewer or a wastewater plant, which makes it suitable for a home.

In 2011 she spent a month putting her proposal together, ten days of it in rural India, before she arrived at her concept. With Gates money, Sankoya built its first prototype in 2012 and a second in 2014.

"As chemists, one of our principles is 'don't mix,' because once different substances are combined they are very hard to separate again," Cheng told QDaily. People usually assume the toilet problem is a wastewater-treatment problem, she said, and that assumption is exactly the problem.

Walk up to a toilet, look at the model, ask a couple of questions — that was how most visitors handled the toilets on show. But some of them pushed back.

At Cranfield's booth, next to the toilet with the blinking lights, a small argument broke out. A man from a Chinese charitable fund, who said he had been all over rural China, told the staff: "Your research is completely wrong. I'd bet there isn't a single village in rural China that could install this toilet."

His point was that these new toilets are powerful and useless — even if local people could afford one, no one would be around to repair and maintain it. "This goes against economics," he said.

The project member who had been showing him around looked embarrassed but answered politely: "You're certainly more experienced than we are, but I don't agree." Every technology goes through a process of evolution, he said, and in the long run costs will come down to a level most people can afford.

Criticism of the Gates toilet challenge has in fact never stopped.

In 2013, Jason Kass, an environmental engineer and founder of the nonprofit Toilets for People (TFP), published an opinion piece in The New York Times headlined "Bill Gates Can't Build a Toilet", calling Gates's toilet work nothing more than an elitist fantasy about the third world: "The Gates Foundation is running experiments with the latest technology thousands of miles from its customers, with a pile of flashy features, enormous budgets and elite engineers."

The winner of the toilet challenge that year was an advanced household toilet that ran on solar power and turned waste into energy, at $1,000 apiece. In the slums of Haiti, Indonesia, Bangladesh and other countries, where people live on $1 to $5 a day, a year's earnings would not cover one toilet. That doesn't count repairs.

The price problem still hasn't been solved.

Gates admitted as much: seven years in, the new toilets remain expensive. Some new-generation toilets cost more than $10,000 each. The target of five cents per person per day is nowhere in sight. The Gates Foundation has decided to put in another $200 million.

"I believe no one can meet that standard right now," Cheng told QDaily, though she thinks every technology has a cost problem early on. "If we set the goal of making a product for under $100, we won't get there straight away. At this stage it has to be more complicated and more expensive to make sure it works properly, and the cost comes down afterwards. Every technology develops this way — smartphones, GPS, cameras..."

Building the toilets is one thing. Getting them deployed and used at scale is another.

Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL) is an NGO working on poverty and public health in Haiti. Its founder, Sasha Kramer, said in an earlier interview: "Building a toilet is the easiest part. The hardest part is making the toilet count. The challenge isn't the technology; it's a question of usability, social mobilization and continued maintenance."

Kass wrote in his piece that one lesson from six decades of failed technology projects is that complicated solutions don't work: "Imagine what would become of a high-tech toilet in a community like that. What if those unusual membrane systems clog? What if the supercritical water tank or the hydrothermal carbonization chamber leaks, or blows up? Or what if some poor resident works out that the toilet is worth more than a year of his income, and decides to steal it?"

Then there are the problems that have nothing to do with the toilet: culture, habit, education. In an interview after the expo, an Indian journalist asked whether better sanitation facilities, on their own, can do enough good — public health is a complicated, moving social question, and housing, education and other social forces have to work with it.

In 2014, India's newly installed prime minister, Narendra Modi, launched a "toilet revolution," spending $20 billion to build 111 million toilets in five years. A year later, some Indian local officials told The Washington Post that building toilets is easy; the real challenge is changing how people think so that they keep using them.

A 22-year-old man interviewed for that story said they had never asked for a toilet — peeing outdoors in the breeze was more comfortable. The article concluded that India's poor toilet habits have little to do with income or water shortages and much more to do with a caste system centuries old.

Gates did not answer directly when asked how he would deal with attitudes that entrenched: "Nobody has ever said sanitation can develop on its own, independent of everything else... You also need vaccines, you need housing, high-quality education — every part of society has to contribute. But I've almost never seen a place that has overinvested in sanitation."

Gates's toilet challenge grew out of a large ambition: cutting the child death rate in poor regions.

Gates went to work at his foundation full time in 2008. By 2013 he had put in $28 billion of his own money, and by 2017 the Gates Foundation had raised $50.7 billion in all. Every year the foundation spends $5 billion on philanthropy — more than the entire annual budget of the World Health Organization.

Gates took apart the problem of children's health the way an engineer would: break it into a set of smaller problems, then find a specific technology for each one.

Mosquitoes spread pathogens in the tropics, so the Gates Foundation paid for research into wiping mosquitoes out by using genetic engineering to make them infertile. Viral infections can kill, so the foundation invested in vaccine programs of all kinds, which its own ten-year review calls the field where it has done the world the most good.

Toilets came into view because feces left outdoors speed up the spread of disease.

"Pathogens of one kind or another cause diarrhea, cholera, typhoid and other diseases that kill nearly 500,000 children under five every year," Gates said as he opened his speech, holding up a jar of feces. He has traveled the world for this, and on his personal blog, Gates Notes, has recorded what he saw at toilets in the United States, India, China and elsewhere across 20 articles and videos. In 2015, for example, Gates went to a fecal-sludge plant in Washington and drank the clean water the plant made out of waste.

His conclusion was that the toilets used in developed regions cost a lot to build and a lot to maintain, and that if they aren't maintained people won't use them. The answer was to use new technology to build toilets that are cheap to make and very cheap to run.

Once the technical goal was set, Gates set a key target the way one does for a product: by 2030, running costs should come down to five cents per person per day. The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and other institutions dedicated to fighting poverty have already promised $2.5 billion in investment, but only projects that meet Gates's product requirements can be built at scale. By then, he believes, this will be a $6 billion market in its own right, big enough to pull commercial companies in.

Thinking this clear is why you won't find a futuristic toilet that dispenses toilet paper by facial recognition on the Gates Foundation's list of funded projects.

But taking a problem apart like an engineer has hit walls before in tech philanthropy.

Consider the problem of getting poor regions online. Scholars at MIT decided the trouble was that computers cost too much, that they were hard to repair in poor regions, and that the power supply there might not be reliable. In 2006 came OLPC, One Laptop per Child: $100, waterproof, with a reflective LCD screen to cut power draw, and ideally a hand crank to generate electricity. Intel, AMD, Microsoft and Linux developers all took part.

To this day no company has built a laptop that meets all of OLPC's requirements for $100. Several generations of compromise products never caught on, and the organization itself disbanded a few years ago.

Meanwhile, the problem of getting poor regions online has largely solved itself. Apple made the mobile internet easy to use; the free Android system and Chinese phone makers brought out smartphones under $100 that still turned a profit. Because there was enough money in it, carriers put up cell towers in poor and even war-torn regions, so people there use phones no different in kind from anyone else's, and information moves faster.

By the end of 2017, smartphone penetration worldwide had reached 63 percent, making the smartphone the fastest piece of hardware in history to reach most of humanity. No vast charitable program, no technology built to order. Syrian refugees fleeing the war now treat a smartphone as they treat water and food.

Cheap internet access, another branch of the same problem, went much the same way: Google tested balloons that would float permanently at high altitude, Facebook built drones that could stay up for very long stretches, both meant to supply free wireless internet worldwide. Both projects were shelved after several years.

Leaders in the developed world find a problem and decide to invent a purpose-built technology for poor regions to use. Bold technical visions are not easy to make real.

And large questions like famine and public health involve more than technology and resources. UN figures show the planet grows enough food to feed everyone, yet famine persists. That is a problem of distribution.

Population, economics, politics — every link in the chain shapes the hunger and the sanitation of hundreds of millions of people. A high-tech toilet may not be the final answer to the toilet problem.

Cover image and some illustrations courtesy of the Gates Foundation.