It’d take a lot of money to make me drink poop. I’ve never put a price on it before, but gun to my head, I wouldn’t do it for any less than what Bill Gates makes in five seconds. But Bill Gates made a video of himself drinking recycled poop to prove a very important point.
The Microsoft founder isn’t drinking poop water on a dare: He’s showing off the Janicki Omniprocessor, a machine that turns raw sewage into clean drinking water, electricity, and ash that was developed with the help of funding from the Gates Foundation.
The societal impact of these machines could be huge. More than 2.5 billion people don’t have reliable access to clean drinking water. The Gates Foundation hopes that the Janicki machines could be deployed worldwide, where a machine operator would buy the sewage and sell the electricity back to the grid. And when it comes to renewable energy, as long as there are people on this earth, there will be poop.
Coupled with the story about the Magic Poo Bus in the UK that runs on human waste, it’s clear that innovators think human waste is some serious sh*t. As for Gates, he could easily extoll the virtues of drinking purified raw sewage on camera while sipping Perrier in between takes. But Bill doesn’t just talk the talk…
…he walks the walk.
[h/t The Verge]
