We hope Bill Gates washed his hands following his speech Tuesday at the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing.
The billionaire philanthropist took the stage with a jar of human feces.
This stinky stunt at the showcase for new toilet technologies was sure to get people talking about sanitation, a pet cause of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Over the past seven years, they have flushed more than $200 million on throne research.
His speech, however, was sure to make him lose dinner companions.
“I have to say, a decade ago I never imagined that I’d know so much about poop,” Gates joked. “And I definitely never thought that Melinda would have to tell me to stop talking about toilets and fecal sludge at the dinner table.”
Gates was at the three-day event to support Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his “toilet revolution,” which has become a priority across the country. The convention boasted new products that challenge the traditional sanitation methods, which the World Health Organization says still eludes 2.3 billion people around the world — a problem that leads to the spread of deadly diseases.
“It’s no longer a question of if we can reinvent the toilet and other sanitation systems. It’s a question of how quickly this new category of off-grid solutions will scale.”
Speaking to the BBC, the Microsoft founder explained how sanitation inequality is a growing
“In rich countries, we have sewers that take clean water in, flush some of the dirty water out. In almost all cases there is a treatment plan,” Gates said. “As we have all these newer cities with lots of less wealthy people in them, those sewers have not been built and in fact, it’s not likely they will ever be, so the question is, could you do it? Could you process human waste without that sewer system?”
This isn’t Gates’ first stunt to grab the attention of the pooparazzi.
In 2015, he shared a video of himself drinking a refreshing cup of water made from feces. The “delicious” H2O had been produced by the Janicki Omni Professor, or JOP machine, which converts human waste into drinking water, electricity and ash.
“It’s tempting to focus on the drinking water, for obvious reasons. But the goal is not to provide water. The goal is to dramatically improve sanitation for all the cities in poor countries,” he said at the time.
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