IIT Kanpur develops zero-waste toilets that reuse flushed water and recycle waste.
IIT Kanpur develops zero-waste toilets that reuse flushed water and recycle waste

Soon it will be possible to have flush toilets with minimal wastage of water. The environmental engineering department of iit Kanpur has developed a toilet that will reuse the water that goes into flushing rather than discharging it along with the excreta. This will be possible by not allowing water and solid waste to mix. So recycling water will be easy.

Everyone is talking of sewage economy and dry sanitation. But no one has yet come up with a proper alternative to dry sanitation. The most feasible alternative is not to use fresh water in toilets because it does not matter what kind of water is used for flushing, says Vinod Tare, the brain behind the toilet. "This will bring down fresh-water consumption to a large extent, considering that each flush consumes 5-10 litres of water.'

Indian Railways has approved the design developed by Tare and his students. "We are going to experiment with the toilet first on a Chennai-Thiruvananthapuram train,' says Tare. unicef has also approached iit Kanpur for using its innovation for community toilets. A trial run for this is on at iit Kanpur and a public launch is likely in early 2008 at Aligarh.

The mechanism When these toilets are flushed the vortex movement of water cleans the pan surface and pushes the solid waste downwards into a tank at the centre. While the centrifugal force