Opinion: Bill Gates’s High-Tech Toilet Quest Is Misguided

The founder of a charity that works to deliver low-cost sanitation solutions to the developing world takes the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to task for its tech-centric Reinvent the Toilet Challenge in a New York Times opinion piece.

Marking World Toilet Day on Tuesday, Jason Kass, an environmental engineer and the founder of Toilets for People, notes that 2.5 billion people around the world don’t have access to a toilet, and he credits the foundation for drawing attention to the problem.

“The trouble is that the Gates foundation has treated the quest to find the proper solution as it would a cutting-edge project at Microsoft: lots of bells and whistles, sky-high budgets, and engineers in elite institutions experimenting with the newest technologies, thousands of miles away from their clients,” Mr. Kass writes. The result, he says, has been expensive prototypes that far exceed the economic or technological resources of the intended recipients.