GATES GRANT TO CREATE NEW LOO

Therefore, a team of researchers has been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), which is co-chaired by the head of Microsoft and his wife, to try to invent better toilets.
BMGF has provided a Bt150-million (US$5 million) research grant to a team led by the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT). The team, which has five years to work on the project, is the sole group in Southeast Asia funded for this goal, a news conference heard yesterday.
“We are privileged to be a partner of BMGF to improve things left after flushing. We will see what to do next with waste, excreta and urine management,” said Associate Professor Thammarat Koottatep, a researcher for environmental engineering and management at AIT’s School of Environment, Resources and Development, who leads the research team.
Thammarat said the Sustainable Decentralised Wastewater Management in Developing Countries research project would run until 2017 and his team would seek technologies that would help people reuse waste. It could be turned into biogas, fertiliser, electricity or other energy. The team has researchers from AIT, Thammasat, Ramkhamhaeng, the University of Science Ho Chi Minh City and Rajamangala University of Technology in Surin.
They would adopt a market-led approach, and there would be lab research to find new waste-management technologies, and market research to figure out needs of customers and users in the region and set affordable prices for the treatment technologies.
Doulaye Kone, a senior programme officer for water, sanitation and hygiene with the BMGF, said the team was among more than 70 research groups in different parts of the world participating in the “Reinventing the Toilet” campaign.
“About 2.5 billion people don’t have access to [reliable sanitary] toilets at all. Around 75 per cent of them live in the Asia and Pacific region. We want high-tech solutions to be affordable for them,” he explained.