An inventor and serial entrepreneur has created a non-flushing, waterless toilet that’s already making sanitation safer and accessible for some 20,000 households,
Deployed in Uganda, Panama, and the United States, the ‘iThrone’ was created when Diana Yousef was working at NASA on spaceborne sanitation.
While brainstorming bathrooms on board space stations, Yousef realized that the requisites for a toilet that works in space were the same for those who live beyond the reach of plumbing and sewage down on Earth—the fate of some 1 billion people worldwide.
Like astronauts, they cannot simply flush away their waste with water down pipes into a sewage system, and so Yousef created a toilet that doesn’t require any.
iThrone rapidly evaporates 95% of the water content of urine and excrement, making human waste disposal in rural areas of low-income countries possible and much safer.
The technology is simple, the design straightforward and replicable, and as stand alone units they can be dropped or trucked into any environment to improve sanitary conditions.
MORE SUCH INVENTIONS: A Jamaican Student Invented a Self-Disinfecting Door Handle for Hospitals: ‘Design that fits reality’
Yousef, who holds degrees at Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard, received this year’s Global Citizen Waislitz Awards award for advancing innovative solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges. It comes with $100,000 to help Diana and her team expand their work and bring the technology to more communities that need it.
Winning this Award, Yousef wrote, will help her startup change:WATER, to scale iThrone distribution to millions more by next year, amplifying its mission to make safe, sustainable sanitation possible for everyone, everywhere.
SHARE This Story Of A Great Invention, The Brilliant Brain Behind It, And The Award It Won…
Nifty idea! I’ve been using indoor dry separating toilets for 25 years, urine going along with all household drain water to a gray water reclamation garden, solids going below the toilet to a box, sprinkled with ash, changed out with an empty box every two years, with the full one reposing a year, then used as fertilizer on non-edible plants. My three beautiful, tiled bathrooms with sinks, shower, tub and the toilets also have well-designed passive air circulation/venting systems, meaning NO ODORS. Realize this might not work in space, but more people could be using this system here on earth and save LOTS of water.