Project attempts to turn toilet waste into drinkable water and rocket fuel!

And the highlight of this latest venture at Manchester University is not just that. It actually is backed by Bill Gates and his foundation which has already donated $100,000 to the project and promised a million if it showed some actual results in the next year or so. Dr. Sarah Haigh is working along with researchers at Imperial College London and Durham University in an attempt to create an affordable technology that will turn all the toilet waste into useful energy along with some drinking water. We already talked about robots that are powered by human waste and maybe this is the start of the future where we get our drinking water from sewage treatment plants!

Dr. Sarah Haigh

The experts in nanotechnology working on the project believe that the can converts toilet waste into a fuel source along with water as byproduct with the help of a scaffold holding a combination of bacteria and small metal nano-particles. These will react with the waste to produce Hydrozene, which is generally used in rockets as fuel. The byproduct of this chemical reaction will be water, which will be safe enough to drink, even though it might not be the purest around.

There is still a long way to go though before the technology is realized. One puzzling aspect of it is that we are already aware of treatment plants and maybe even some space technology that does exactly the same. If not produce Hydrozene, we already seem to have methods which can turn sewage water into clean water. It will be interesting to see how this technology moves forward and if in a year’s time Dr. Sarah Haigh will be able to put the theoretical equations into practice.

Via: Dailymail