Biogas plant for the bathroom launched for World Toilet Day
Headquarted in Israel and founded in 2012, HomeBiogas is a company that specialises in the manufacturing of small-scale biogas systems that convert organic waste into renewable cooling fuel. And on the 19th of November it announced the launch of its new product, The Bio-Toilet.
The Bio-Toilet can be attached to HomeBiogas’ biogas system which then enables the human waste from the toilet to be converted into cooking fuel. The process doesn’t require a connection to the sewage or water grid, so makes for a well-designed and clean system.
The World Health Organization (WHO) states that 2.3 billion people in the world currently have no access to basic toilet facilities. This leads to extremely poor sanitation which causes diseases such as cholera and diarrhoea, both of which contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year.
In 2015 the UN General Assembly declared the 19th of November, World Toilet Day in order to raise awareness on the issue. HomeBiogas CEO and co-founder Oshik Efrati told News Every day that the UN’s sustainable development goals challenged them; “We took our solution, the HomeBiogas 2.0, which converts food waste into cooking fuel, and thought about how we could take advantage of that existing technology for the important goal of allowing all humans in earth the right to a decent, safe and clean toilet.”
The distinctive feature of the Bio-Toilet is that it doesn’t require large, underground and complex infrastructure to function. It is also nearly maintenance-free. This is because the toilets manual pump dispatches of the waste directly to the HomeBiogas appliance to be processed into methane, and then turned into cooking fuel.
The Bio-Toilet itself is compact and transportable as it can be packed into one box. It can be installed indoors as well as outdoors as long as the biodigester is located up to 7 meters away from it.
