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Posted to the TEDMED Blog on August 30, 2016
This guest blog post is by TEDMED 2015 speaker Peter Janicki

I have been working on large mechanical engineering projects since I got out of college 25 years ago, but the last 3-4 years have been by far the most exciting and rewarding. When you travel through the streets of India or Africa you see some of the most industrious, talented and hardworking people ever, but many of them are just struggling to survive and the sanitation conditions are awful. Making money using fecal sludge, garbage and other waste as the feed stock to radically transform these conditions is my dream…

“The next time you flush a toilet, consider this: 1 billion people defecate in the open. Another 4 billion use rudimentary toilets and their waste is never treated.

I have visited communities where this is a sobering fact of life. The smell can be overwhelming, but even worse, the sewage seeps into the water supply, spreading disease. Poor sanitation is linked to the deaths of some 700,000 children every year.

Our foundation is funding the Omni Processor, a machine that we hope will make sanitation affordable. In this slideshow you can read more about the OP and see what a difference breakthrough sanitation ideas can make…”

— Bill Gates | August 11, 2015