[VIDEO] Watch Moment When Bill Gates Drinks Water Made From Human Faeces

Bill Gates has drunk a glass of water made from human faeces, to showcase technology he said could provide clean water in the developing world. The Microsoft founder said he wanted to begin sending processing plants around the world after tests later this year. The project was welcomed by WaterAid, which said that it could particularly help in urban areas. According to the charity, some 748 million people worldwide lack clean drinking water. In a video posted on his blog, Mr Gates watched as the human waste was fed into the processor, before drinking the end product from a glass. “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 wrote in the blogpost. In the video, the developer of the Omniprocessor system, Peter Janicki, says the raw “sewer sludge” is first boiled, during which process the water vapour is separated from the solids. Those solids are then put into a fire, producing steam that drives an engine producing electricity for the system’s processor and for the local community.

The water is put through a cleaning system to produce drinking water. “Why would anyone want to turn waste into drinking water and electricity?” Gates asked. The answer, he wrote, was because “diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically”. He added: “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.”