where will the toilet of the future come
from when will it arrive and what is it
going to look like for an answer to this
question I looked at the Earth’s
writer’s minds people working in
exploration of Antarctica space and Mars
first Antarctica as you can imagine it’s
very cold there and there are about 60
research stations from all over the
world working in doing research in
Antarctica and I ask the obvious
so first to get water they dig a deep
well from which they melt water and then
once they have well big enough they get
all the waste water including poop and
they discharge in this ice pits in
how about in space nASA has a 23 point 4
million dollar toilet it separately
collects urine and faeces the urine gets
recycled along with astronauts tears and
sweat and they get to drink all that so
I thought that was promising how about
astronaut poop
what happens to it well it gets
dehydrated and compacted and stuffed
into a space trash can it’s called
progress and the Russians built it
so once progress is full of trash and
astronaut poop it’s fired towards Earth
and as it enters our atmosphere it
catches fire and it burns like a
that’s progress so next time we see a
shooting star let’s all make a wish for
a better space toilet and how about Mars
back in September I got to ask
Elon Musk one of the main forces behind
Mars exploration if his company is
working on a toilet for Mars CNN called
my question bizarre and a lot of people
called me stupid
I mean who asks Elon Musk if he’s
working on a toilet the same person who
read the NASA technology roadmaps
technology area number six section 1.3.1
which says that NASA is looking for a
better space toilet and to get to Mars
we’re going to have to develop one by
2021 and if we’re going to be
self-sustaining in Mars we’re going to
have to figure out a better toilet but
what’s wrong with our toilets why can’t
we just bring our toilets from earth to
space the fact is that it’s not only
space toilets that need to be improved
it’s the toilet that you and I use today
including in this very same building to
learn a little bit more about the
shortcomings of our toilet I wanted to
share with you four experiences that
happened to me this summer the first is
the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro
and I’m not sure if you guys remember
but the whole world found out that the
waters of Guanabara Bay was contaminated
with sewage and that any athlete that
swimming there risked getting sick I
wonder how many of you know about a
triathlon that happened in Washington DC
shortly after that there’s a river
called Potomac River in the nation’s
capital right by the White House and
this triathlon competition swimming
portion was canceled
for the same reasons as rio de janeiro
that is too much fecal matter in the
river after that I was in Miami and for
a weekend and there was a health warning
advisory against swimming in the waters
of South Beach for the same reasons too
much sewage in the beach and earlier
this summer I was here in Cancun and I
swam from cocoon to Isla Mujeres and
even though I was in the water for hours
I saw no major wildlife or coral life so
why is there so much sewage in all of
our waters no matter where you are rich
or poor countries to learn a little bit
about that we need to understand where
our modern sanitation system came from
and it all we have to thank London and
Industrial Revolution because that’s
when a lot of people moved in from the
countryside into the city of London and
back then in the 1850s there were a lot
of cholera typhoid dysentery and
hepatitis outbreaks because when the
washcloths came together people didn’t
know what to do with all the waste water
so they just did septic tanks but then
since a lot of people start getting sick
the city leaders had the brilliant and
expeditious idea of channeling all the
waste water into the Thames River and
that’s how our modern sanitation system
was born in fact sewage comes from C
ward or towards the sea so the fact that
today in most cities around the world
we have sewage in our rivers is no
accident it’s by design but one of the
most harmful shortcomings of our modern
sanitation system is that it wastes a
lot of water the bathroom in your house
is a single largest user of water in
your household as much as 30 percent
since the 1850s we haven’t really
improved
intention we have lacked innovation in
this area because we stopped thinking
about it and I think the worst side
effect of our lack of innovation in this
area is the fact that one third of the
world’s population lacks access to
sanitation three billion people just
look at the two people next to you and
you are the one without a toilet how
would you go about your day and I was
very unsatisfied with this modern
sanitation system because I want
everyone in the whole world to have a
toilet and a water flushing toilet
cannot be the answer to this question so
I wanted to see what happened before
1850 how did we manage sanitation before
then could we learn from history and I
was very happy to find two great
examples one right here in Mexico if you
recognize that is the valley of central
Mexico during the 16th century that’s
Mexico Tenochtitlan and when the Aztecs
first came to the valley they had to
constantly fight water first because it
was always flooding their land and
second because brackish water was mixing
with fresh water so the Aztecs built
this aqueduct which also worked as dikes
and their cosway’s if you look in the
middle of the of the picture that’s
magical to know chitlin but in the
beginning it was just a couple of little
islands in this shallow Lakes and so the
Aztecs had the engineers idea of
building chinampas which was a
technology in which they staked out
piles into the light shallow lake bed
and they would backfill it with mud and
aquatic plants and that’s how they
raised themselves above the water level
when the Europeans arrived they were
mesmerised at 10:08 land and how clean
it was and how further the land was and
the two numbers were also do you
for plantations in such miracle they are
there to this day
and so what did the bathrooms of the
Aztecs look like first they were very
clean they had Thomas callus and steam
baths twice a day but they didn’t have
private bathrooms there were instead
community restrooms in each of the
canals and what they would do they would
separately collect urine and faeces just
like in the space station the urine had
many uses like tanning hides the
Thiessen’s were collected also in
pottery and mixed with limestone or
firewood ash once the pots were filled
they would then be taken by canoes to
the farmlands where they would be used
as manure that’s right
the Aztecs used human manure to
fertilize their fields but they weren’t
the only ones if you look throughout
history the Romans have done it in
through the cloaca Maxima and in Asia
the Chinese have also done it through
night soil what the Essex knew and what
we have forgotten is that there is this
thing called the nutrient cycle in
nature there is no such thing as waste
every time that we harvest plants from
the soil we’re removing precious
nutrients and the only way to restore
fertility is through manure the Aztecs
didn’t have any cows so they just use
human manure and the reason that they
have been able to do that and we can
also still do that today is because
human manure is a precious ingredient if
we look at it from a first principles
perspective from a scientific point of
view we’re going to realize that urine
is 95% water urine also has ammonia from
which we can get nitrogen
it also has potassium and phosphate
human manure the solids also has 75%
water and then nitrogen potassium and
phosphate
that those are very incredibly rich
nutrients and if you go into the local
hardware store
you’re going to buy fertilizer that has
exactly those same ingredients
another example that I found was from my
home country Brazil and there were also
many successfully civilizations in the
Amazons back before Europeans arrived
with hundreds of thousands of members
and the way that they managed all the
waste including organic animal and
vegetable waste was through this
practice called biological charcoal or
biochar you can produce biochar through
these mounds or also you can do a
barbacoa style cooking under the earth
and biochar is produced like this you
get all the wastes and then you put in
these stoves and the secret is to have
an oxygen starved environment at which
point you have a pyrolysis pyrolysis
means that when you’re cooking an
organic matter you have an evaporation
of gases and what remains is this
charcoal like substance which is full
which is rich in carbon so given the
physical and the chemical
characteristics of the charcoal when you
mix it with the soil you then get water
retention nutrient retention and also
the bacteria that are inherently in the
soil they congregate near the biochar
and then they help the plants obtain all
the nutrients from the soil kind of like
the bacteria in our stomachs also help
us obtain nutrients from our foods so
back then we knew all of this we were
sustainable we had no other choice this
is dr. von Herzen from the climate
foundation he has done a biochar reactor
that we can use
– produced biochar from human manure I
used his paper to present a toilet
prototype for Mars and my paper was one
of 25 selected around the world and if
Ellen musk is listening I’d like to
propose that we’re going to give you
this free of charge the good thing about
using biochar for Mars is that we can
use the same design here on earth for
the three billion people who today don’t
have sanitation or a toilet one of the
things that makes me really sad about
sanitation is that 1.2 million children
under the age of 5 die every year
needlessly just because they don’t have
access to sanitation and it’s not their
fault it’s not like they have to be
developed and civilized like us so that
one day they can also poop in their
waters it’s up to us to change the
so with all they said what will the
toilet of the future look like first of
all it’s going to be waterless water is
two pressures of a resource for us to
contaminate just to transport human
waste instead we’re going to use vacuum
suction the total of the future won’t be
thought of as a disposal device instead
it’s going to be used to collect
precious nutrients we won’t treat human
waste instead we’re going to enrich
human manure the toilet of the future
won’t be exclusive so that only a couple
of us can use it instead it’s going to
be universal the toilet of the future is
not going to be polluting or wasteful
it’s going to be sustainable but what
makes me the happiest about the toilet
of the future is that we don’t have to
we don’t have to wait for a
technological miracle from NASA because
if we learn the lessons of our ancestors
and if we combine them with current
technology then the toilet of the future
already exists thank you [Applause]
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