Bill Gates funds development of odour-free toilets for India

The billionaire philanthropist’s ‘The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’ partnered with a Swiss-based perfume company ‘Firmenich’ to create a faeces smell blocker with the hope to make stinking toilets a thing of past and make a difference in communities with poor sanitation. Noting that one billion people had no access to toilets and defecate in the open, 61-year-old Gates said three billion have toilets but their waste is dumped untreated, seeping into water and food supplies, leading to many diseases and slow economic growth. “Beyond the tremendous human suffering, it’s a problem that slows economic development. In India alone, poor sanitation costs nearly $55 billion each year— more than 6 per cent of GDP,” Gates wrote on his Gates Notes blog. “Millions of new toilets are being built around the world to help end open defecation, including in India where a massive new toilet construction programme is currently underway. This is great news. Unfortunately, many of these new toilets, especially the pit latrines, don’t get used because they smell bad and people continue to relieve themselves in the open. This is a worrying trend that threatens to undermine the progress that’s been achieved in global sanitation,” he said. 

While pleasant fragrances are often used to cover tough odours, Firmenich decided to try a different and ‘more sophisticated approach’ to get rid of the toilet stink. It managed to isolate the four chemical compounds that are responsible for the terrible smell in toilets, and recreated the odour using synthetic compounds. It used the ‘faeces perfume’ to develop fragrances that block certain olfactory receptors in our noses, making us unable to register these bad smells. The approach is similar to noise-cancelling headphones which many people use to block out jet engine noise on flights, Gates wrote. “I had an opportunity to experience the odour-blocking fragrances in action. I was invited to push my nose into a glass sniffing tube and breathe in a mixture of the faeces perfume. It smelled pretty good. There was no evidence of repulsive odour I had experienced earlier,” he said.

“The question now is whether this technology is good enough to make a difference in communities with poor sanitation. That’s why Firmenich is launching pilot projects in communities across India and Africa to understand whether the fragrances will make toilets and pit latrines more inviting for users,” Gates said. He said the company also needed to determine if it is better to distribute the fragrance as a spray, a powder, or something else. “The ultimate goal is to make the product affordable and easy-touse,” he said.