Bill Gates’ Plan to Help the Developing World Profit From Its Sewage

BY DAVEY ALBA
01.06.15 |
6:30 AM |
PERMALINK

Gates drinks water filtered by the OmniProcessor, a new kind of sewage treatment plant funded by his philanthropic foundation.

The Gates Notes

Bill Gates walks up to the water tap, but before he can drink, his entourage pulls him to one side. One woman takes off his glasses and rearranges his hair. Another dabs on a little makeup. And, at one point, someone hands him a Mason jar.

Once it’s filled with water from the tap, he takes a sip from the jar, and a Gates Foundation photographer captures the moment. Then there’s another water-sipping photo-op with Peter Janicki, the man who offered him this drink on the outskirts in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, about 70 miles north of Seattle. “It’s water!” Gates says, with mock surprise.

Janicki’s OmniProcessor converts human waste and sludge into electricity and water

The Gates Notes

Bill feigns surprise because five minutes ago, the water was human waste pumped in from a local sewage facility. It was transformed into clean water by what’s called the OmniProcessor, a new kind of low-cost waste treatment plant funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and designed by Janicki’s company, Janicki Bioenergy. On this November day, Gates is taking his first tour of Janicki’s contraption, which he believes can transform global sanitation. Using an innovative blend of steam power and water filtration, according to Gates and his foundation, this plant can convert up to 14 tons of sewage into potable water and electricity each day.

Now that a prototype is up and running in Washington, the foundation hopes to bring the OmniProcessor to India, Africa, and other developing parts of the world, saying that each roughly $1.5-million plant can process sewage for a community of about 100,000 people. “If you can get thousands of these things out there, then you’ve ensured the people really will grow up in a healthy way,” Gates says. “They’ll live much higher quality lives. You will save a lot of lives. And you’ll have local entrepreneurs who are maintaining these things.”

The potential benefits are enormous. Forty percent of the global population—or 2.5 billion urban residents—practice open defecation or otherwise lack adequate sanitation, and an additional 2.1 billion urban residents use facilities that do not safely dispose of human waste. About 1.5 million children die every year from contaminated food and water, and in developing countries, half of all patients in hospitals are there because of problems with water and sanitation. What’s more, all this puts an economic strain on such countries. In India, bad sanitation practices costs the country nearly $54 billion a year, or 6.4 percent of its GDP.

The OmniProcessor can help solve these problems, Gates and his foundation say, because it’s so much more efficient than ordinary treatment plants. Modern sewage plants grab electricity from the grid, release water vapor into the atmosphere, and, oftentimes, buy up natural gas to create enough heat to incinerate the wet sludge. The OmniProcessor, on the other hand, recaptures squandered energy and puts it to use. The hope is that it will turn the nasty business of sewage processing from a cost center into a profits center, with operators—local governments or philanthropic entrepreneurs—charging for the electricity and water produced by the machine. Next month, the Janicki team will travel to Dakar, Senegal to rebuild the OmniProcessor and, for the first time, test it in the developing world.

Peter Janicki and Bill Gates fill their glasses with water from the OmniProcessor

The Gates Notes

A New Kind of Treatment Plant

Sedro-Woolley is an old logging and coal-mining town in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. The population stands at about 10,000, and Janicki is one of the more prominent names. Peter Janicki and other members of his extended family run Janicki Industries, which was founded in 1993. This month, his sister-in-law, Lisa Janicki, the company’s CFO, is running for county commissioner. As I drive out to the company’s headquarters—just before Gates pays his visit—her campaign signs line the streets.

“The reason I live here is because my dad lived here, and the reason my dad lived here is because my grandfather homesteaded here,” Peter Janicki says.

Janicki Industries typically builds machine parts for aerospace, marine, space, and transportation operations—customers include Lockheed, NASA and General Electric—and another subsidiary deals in logging. But lately Peter Janicki, the company’s CEO, has applied its resources in new ways. After more than two years of work, his water-treatment prototype is processing sewage in the middle of an open lot, behind the other Janicki buildings.

When I arrive, Janicki walks me out to this rather compact contraption. It’s about the size of two school buses placed side by side. A steel blue staircase runs along one side, and a kind of conveyor belt feeds raw sewage into a drum. The stench is noticeable, but not overpowering. As we stroll around the outside, a pillar of white smoke spews from the top of the plant, and eventually, we reach the pipe at the back where the water emerges, ready for drinking.

What goes on inside? As Janicki explains it, the OmniProcessor is really three things: a steam power plant, an incinerator, and a water filtration system (see video below). The trick is that these three things feed off each other, in sometimes recursive ways. “The first thing I did was work out the thermodynamics,” says Janicki. “It’s a little bit like an accountant looking through things and saying: ‘Do we have enough money to make this thing work? What does the balance sheet look like?’ I did the same thing, looking at the energy, and was pleasantly surprised early on that it looked like this could work. And once I figured that out, it was just a matter of dealing with the details.”

A steam engine generates heat for a dryer, which accepts the raw sewage and dries it out. Then the sludge is boiled, and this separates the solids from the water. The incinerator then burns the dried-out solids, producing a high-temperature, high-pressure steam that helps drive the steam engine and, through a generator, makes electricity that can power the OmniProcessor. And the process repeats.

At the same time, water vapor produced by the sludge dryer travels through a cyclone to spin out any entrained particles, and then other filters—a coarse filter and a fine half-micron membrane filter that resembles Goretex fabric—remove additional substances. A condenser then turns the vapor back into water, which is aerated and passes through multiple activated charcoal filters.

The water is indeed drinkable—I’ve tried it myself—and Janicki says his company has tested it against various supermarket brands. “Our water meets or exceeds the standards of every one of those,” he tells me.

But the plant provides more than just water. The steam plant produces additional electricity, and the solids left by the boiler—a kind of non-toxic ash—contain phosphorus and potassium, which can be used for soil fertilizer. As described by Janicki, it’s the very model of efficiency. But there’s still work to be done. Gates’ visit is just the end of the project’s initial phase.

As we climb the aluminum stairs, Janicki peers at something on the side of the machine and then shouts down to someone on the ground. “Hey Roy?” he says. “We’ve got a joint that’s leaking here.” He blames a rip in a rubber seal on the cold Seattle temperatures, and soon, he hands me off to a colleague, hurrying back to the main building.

The Sanitation Game

Melinda Gates, left, lifts a pail of water, as her husband Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates looks on, during a demonstration at an advance media tour of visitor center of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington in 2012.

Anthony Bolante/Reuters/Corbis

About an hour later, Gates arrives by helicopter, together with a few staffers from the Gates Foundation. Eventually, they pile into a conference room, alongside Janicki, his wife, his five sons, and various other family members who work for his company. The long table in the middle of the room is littered with some snacks and Diet Cokes, Bill’s favorite drink. “Everyone’s here on a Sunday, huh?” Gates says, dressed in a black zip-up sweater.

Gates and his Foundation have a deep interest in sanitation. The Foundation first started exploring the area in 2005, and in 2010, it officially launched a Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene program. “Sanitation, and in particular urban sanitation, is hugely neglected and under-invested,” says Brian Arbogast, the program’s director.

The program made headlines with its Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, a call to create a new toilet that doesn’t require a sewer or water connection or electricity, costs less than 5 cents per user per day, and meet people’s particular needs, especially in poorer nations. So far, it has awarded 16 grants to research organizations across the globe, and it has held two Reinvent the Toilet Fairs, in Seattle, Washington in August 2012, and then in India, in March 2014, hoping to spur additional research.

Janicki’s company participated in the 2014 fair, after catching the eye of Doulaye Koné, a senior officer with the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene program who has more than 15 years of experience working as a water and sanitation specialist in West Africa, Switzerland, and Belgium, among other places. When the Gates Foundation called for new ways of capturing and treating sewage in 2011, Janicki submitted a proposal on behalf of his company.

The Foundation ultimately rejected it, but Janicki persisted until he shared an idea that struck a chord with the program officers: burning waste to generate steam power. “What I learned quickly about Peter is that he wanted to work on fundamental R&D issues for challenges where we didn’t understand how to configure a solution,” Koné says.

With Koné’s backing, the Foundation awarded Janicki a contract to build his OmniProcessor in 2012, and with Janicki’s son, Aaron, set to live with and test the technology in Senegal next month, Gates is here to personally scrutinize the company’s work.

As Janicki renews his pitch in conference room, Gates is full of praise, but also appropriately skeptical. At one point, he asks why other plants haven’t tried to generate energy in similar ways, and a company engineer says that incineration regulations, which vary from state to state, can limit options. “Do we have a dioxin problem?” Gates then asks, and Janicki says that the plant meets Washington and federal regulations.

According to Mark van Loosdrecht, a professor of environmental biotechnology at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, who has studied wastewater treatment for 25 years, the Omni-Processor could be as efficient as Janicki claims—in theory. He says only time will tell whether it will work as advertised. But he applauds the Foundation for working to move sanitation research in new directions. “[The Foundation] gives the developers the certainty that if they improve, they don’t need to worry about the support,” he says. “And personally, I like the longterm vision instead of the usual program with short term gains.”

‘The Kind of Thing Other People Wouldn’t Do’

Later in the day, after he’s sipped some of the OmniProcessor’s water, I sit down with Gates in a smaller room. There’s more Chex Mix and Diet Coke on the table.

He talks in platitudes and he often drifts into tech-speak. At one point, he refers to the sewage as the plant’s “input stream.” But his main point is well taken. It’s the same point laid down by van Loosdrecht.

He calls the OmniProcessor “the kind of thing other people wouldn’t do.” Much is still left to be done, but the Foundation is committed to Janicki’s project, and it’s committed to making it work in Senegal and perhaps other parts of the developing world. “We like things,” he says, “where the rich world’s system doesn’t scale down for some reason.”