“Stated very simply, we’re taking infrastructure and we’re turning it into an appliance,” Yee says. “So, no water coming into the toilet and no output sewage. . . . You just plug it in wherever you need a bathroom and it treats your waste.” The design is similar to an espresso machine, Yee says, and runs on electricity (Yee’s background is not in toilets, but in thermal energy technologies). It has a front end unit, which looks just like a regular toilet, and then a rear processing unit where the waste treatment happens. The solids and liquids are kept separate, then the poop is subjected to intense heat and pressure. “We enter into this phase of matter known as a supercritical fluid where the feces spontaneously combusts underwater.  It’s a pretty unique way of doing this: we can actually burn feces underwater,” Yee says.  The water from human urine is purified and used to flush the toilet, while the feces is transformed into small, odorless “feces cakes,” which can be composted or thrown in the trash. Yee and his team are currently field testing the “super toilets” in South Africa, India, China and the U.S..  He hopes that if successful, the design will be able to save cities millions of dollars in waste processing and sewage infrastructure costs. Yee’s work is just one of many global projects working on solving the sticky problem of human waste. Listen to this week’s World Changing Ideas podcast, where we explore all the weird and wonderful things going on around the world involving poop, from fecal transplants to precious metal mining and biogas production.

Amelia Hemphill Everybody poops, but not everybody’s poop gets spontaneously combusted under water https://www.fastcompany.com/90800800/everybody-poops-but-not-everybodys-poop-gets-spontaneously-combusted-under-water 10-26-22