8TH Thermal and Fluids Engineering Conference (Hybrid), March, 26-29, 2023, College Park, MD, USA
Indoor plumbing and sewer sanitation technologies have enabled healthy and productive lives for billions residing in developed nations. However, globally there are ~3.6B people without access to improved sanitation. This is largely because the infrastructure to provide connected sanitary sewers and centralized treatment facilities is too expensive for those living in poverty. For the last decade, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has championed this global equity issue though the reinvent the toilet challenge (RTTC) initiative. Through this program, several success stories have emerged resulting in container-sized treatment systems that process waste at the community level. However, the single-user reinvented toilet (SURT) has remained elusive. This SURT essentially needs to do everything that a large container or centralized sewage treatment facility does, but within the space constraints of the toilet and washing machine. Additionally this must be accomplished at a cost that is acceptable to the world’s poorest people. With that goal in mind, Prof. Shannon Yee leads the Generation 2 Reinvented Toilet (G2RT) program, where a global team of scientists and engineers are taking a second look at the reinventing the toilet solution space and integrating the best concepts developed across the RTTC program with the goal of realizing a low-cost SURT solution. Come and learn how this large global team is approaching the problem through international collaboration bringing expert engineering to bear to turn an infrastructure into an appliance.
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