A LooWatt? The Toilet Reinvented
Anything that can be recycled should be recycled, including poop. That’s according to industrial designer Virginia Gardiner.
It makes a lot of sense. After all, places in Asia and Africa have been using dried cow dung as fuel to cook food for many years. And more recently, in many rural areas of India, waste has been converted to biogas which is used to generate electricity and heat.
So why not find a way to convert human waste into energy, as well?
That’s just what Virginia Gardener has done. Her prototypical waterless toilet, aptly named LooWatt, is a closed-loop management system that will recycle poop.
Here’s how it works. First you make a “deposit” in the toilet. Then you turn a crank on the toilet which, instead of flushing, pushes the waste down into a receptacle that is lined with a carbon-rich biodegradable film.
But it doesn’t end there. It might be out of sight and out of mind, not to mention out of smelling range, but it’s still there until removed in the prototype sealed container. And here’s where it gets really interesting – or gross, depending on how you look at it. The compressed waste is taken to an anaerobic digester which, in turn, will produce cooking gas from the methane.
It is, as Virginia explains in this video, a true circle of life action.
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