NASA-inspired waterless toilet brings safe sanitation to 20,000 households
An inventor and serial entrepreneur has created a non-flushing, waterless toilet that is making sanitation safer and more accessible for some 20,000 households in Uganda, Panama and the United States.
The ‘iThrone’ was created by Diana Yousef while she was working at NASA on spaceborne sanitation. While brainstorming bathrooms for space stations, Yousef realised that the requirements for a toilet that works in space are the same for those who live beyond the reach of plumbing and sewage on Earth — the fate of some 1 billion people worldwide.
Like astronauts, they cannot simply flush waste with water into a sewage system, and so Yousef created a toilet that does not require any.
The 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 standalone units they can be dropped or trucked into any environment.
Yousef, who holds degrees from Cornell, Columbia and Harvard, received this year’s Global Citizen Waislitz Award for advancing innovative solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges. The award comes with $100,000 to help expand the technology.
Winning the award, Yousef said, will help her startup change:WATER scale iThrone distribution to millions more by next year, amplifying its mission to make safe, sustainable sanitation possible for everyone, everywhere.
