www.fastcompany.com/1760918/can-matt-damon-bring-clean-water-africa
Next time you see a dog lapping thirstily at a toilet bowl, pause for thought - next time, it could be you.
A new invention - funded by Bill Gates - aims to turn used toilet water into drinking water.
Manchester University’s Sarah Haigh is an expert in nanotechnology - the science of manipulating atoms in matter - and says, it could make waste water from toilets safe to drink.
Sarah Haigh is working on a device which will turn toilet waste into fuel - and drinking water
Number 2.0? A scaffold device holding a mixture
of bacteria and tiny metal nano-particles will react with the water to
extract useful hydrogen, with the remainder filtered again to produce
clean water
Haigh believes a new range of materials could extract energy from human waste.
Although the result may not be bottled mineral water, the researcher says the results could be the difference between life-and-death in regions without clean water.
She said: ‘I get a lot of comments about the research I do. I don’t mind people making jokes as long as they're clean ones.
There has been a lot of research into biofuels. There is a lot of energy already present in human waste. Nano-scale materials mean that you can harvest the hydrogen and turn it into hydrozene - which is basically rocket fuel.
The expert, from Manchester University’s school of materials, believes that a scaffold device holding a mixture of bacteria and tiny metal nano-particles will react with the water to extract useful hydrogen, with the remainder filtered again to produce clean water.
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