The next time you use the toilet, give a thought to what you would do if there weren't one. That's the challenge that faces 40 percent of the earth's population - 2.6 billion people - who don't have access to toilets as we know them.
In response to that situation, which has both health and environmental consequences, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge. It is part of the foundation's new Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene (WaSH) strategy and includes awarding research grants aiming to "catalyze innovations in sanitation and radically reshape the entire sanitation value chain".
Twenty-two universities around the world were invited to submit proposals to invent a water-free toilet that needs no sewer connection and costs less than five U.S. cents per day to use. The foundation announced at the AfricaSan conference in Kigali, Rwanda, on Tuesday that a South African university is one of the eight winners of the challenge.
U.S.$3 million has been allocated to three universities in Europe, three in North America, and one each in Asia and Africa. Each university will receive approximately $400,000 to pursue its efforts to reinvent the toilet.
South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) is the sole African grantee, winning for a project developed by the department of Chemical Engineering's Pollution Research Group: a community bathroom block that mineralizes human waste and recovers clean water, nutrients and energy.
The university describes it as "an innovative and groundbreaking initiative that will take toilet technology and sanitation to a new level".
"This toilet will be economically accessible even for the poorest billion in the world," is the proud claim of international sanitation expert Professor Chris Buckley, who heads the UKZN research group. "And the objectives of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge are directly applicable to the situation in Durban."
This is because the research is based on actual ablution blocks serving the city's shack settlements, home to more than a million people and expanding at a rate of 10 percent a year.
"We're excited about UKZN's leading role in this area," said the director of the Gates Foundation's Water, Sanitation and Hygiene initiative, Frank Rijsberman. He is also optimistic about the university's partner, the eThekwini Water and Sanitation department of the city of Durban.
The university has signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the municipality which supports the Pollution Research Group's research into delivery of water and sanitation services to residents of poor, informal settlements.
This has led to innovative approaches aimed at serving communities without proper sanitation, such as Urinary Diversion (UD) toilets, ventilated improved pit latrines and pilot projects aimed at recovering valuable materials from waste.
"This is one of the most forward looking municipalities - the only one with large scale experience with UD toilets that is actively experimenting with redeveloping community toilet blocks. So this municipality and UKZN are a great combination," Rijsberman said in an interview.
"It's a fantastic opportunity for scientists to see and appreciate the problems that happen when you try to scale up these processes," said Buckley, who describes the relationship between his university and the city as "symbiotic".
"We couldn't think of a better research partner, and with the Gates Foundation and their funding coming to the party we have all the ingredients necessary to try and solve our sanitation problems," he said.
"We have literally hundreds, if not thousands of these UD toilets and pit latrines which the city helps us access, so it's magnificent for research."
A 2009 Gates Foundation grant helped develop the UD toilet, which recovers nutrients from urine to make fertilizer. It is now being pursued with various partners, including the Swiss institute of water research, EAWAG.
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The project is called VUNA, for Valorization of Urine Nutrients in Africa, which is also the Zulu word for harvest.
Rijsberman explained that this latest grant won by UKZN involves some of the same players but adds another focus: a machine that processes faecal sludge into pellets of sanitized fertilizer.
The head of Durban's sanitation department, Neil Macleod, was delighted to hear that the local university was among the winners of the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge.
"We are good at running systems and they are good at research," said Macleod from Durban. "It's better to do research in a live environment than only in the laboratory, so you can know that it's actually based on reality, that it's not only theoretical or out of touch."
"It's perfect synergy because we have a culture of innovation," said Macleod of his department and the university researchers. "We're not protecting the status quo, we're trying to find ways to solve urgent sanitation problems."
