New Delhi, January 7 – How safe is water taken out of feces? If you ask Bill Gates, one of the richest persons in the world, he will tell you that it is very safe. How does he know? Because he recently drank it.
As part of his many humanitarian initiatives, Gates is funding research into how water derived from human poop or contaminated with poop can be made safe. And recently to check the result from the latest in this field, he drank a glass of water taken out of poop and cleaned with a special process.
“I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyer belt and drop into a large bin. 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 recently wrote on his blog.
“The water 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,” he added. Gates said that research into how to make water contaminated with poop safe is important. He said that millions of people still defecate in open and feces often contaminates water.
“If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy,” he wrote on his blog . The machine that produced a glass of water for Gates is called the Omniprocessor.
“It might be many years before the processor is being used widely… (but) I’m excited about (it). The processor wouldn’t just keep human waste out of the drinking water; it would turn waste into a commodity with real value in the marketplace.
It’s the ultimate example of that old expression: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” wrote Gates. As for how do we know that Gates is telling the truth and that he actually drank water taken out of waste? Well, he has a video to prove it. You too can watch.
-INDIA TODAY
