As legend has it, when French workers felt their livelihoods threatened by automation in the early 1900s, they flung their wooden shoes called sabots into the machines to stop them. Hence the word sabotage. Instead of wasting good footwear, perhaps they should’ve tried wet toilet paper.
In two new papers published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, engineers from Duke University report on results from the first large-scale, real-world field trials of critical components of their off-grid sanitation system. Since 2011, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “Reinvent the Toilet” initiative has invested more than $200 million to fund these and other efforts to create small-scale sanitation systems to serve the needs of the 4.2 billion people who lack safely managed sanitation worldwide.
While their nutrient removal processes need improvement, the researchers say they were pleasantly surprised at how long the system’s components lasted. They were also reminded of just how important cultural practices can be to the success of a global engineering challenge.
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