"Bill Gates Can't Build A Toilet"
NY Times guest editorial:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/opinion/bill-gates-cant-build-a-toilet.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
(snip)
IN addition to eradicating polio in India and starting the personal computer revolution, the Seattle Superman of our age has managed to make going to the bathroom a cause célèbre. Five years ago, if I’d told people I worked on toilets, they would have surely assumed I was a plumber. Now, they exclaim: “Oh! Isn’t Bill Gates into that?”
More than one-third of the world’s population, approximately 2.5 billion people, doesn’t have access to a toilet. The Gates Foundation and a handful of celebrities like Matt Damon deserve credit for putting this sanitation crisis on the map.
The trouble is that the Gates Foundation has treated the quest to find the proper solution as it would a cutting-edge project at Microsoft: lots of bells and whistles, sky-high budgets and engineers in elite institutions experimenting with the newest technologies, thousands of miles away from their clients.
(snip)
High-tech toilets are exciting, but even the Gates Foundation has admitted that
“the economics of such a solution remain uncertain.”
In plain English:
No one can afford them.
(snip)
(boldface emphasis is mine - DMH)
More at the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/opinion/bill-gates-cant-build-a-toilet.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
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The writer of this opinion piece, Jason Kass, is an environmental engineer and the founder of the organization Toilets for People.
http://www.toiletsforpeople.org/
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