Watch Bill Gates sip 'delicious drinking water' that used to be human feces

The richest man in the world is putting his money where his mouth is and he's even willing to taste the results.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently performed a taste-test of drinking water produced by a special machine that purifies sewage for human consumption. The Gates-funded device is called the OmniProcessor, and it uses boilers, steam power and a filtration process to ingest human feces and output clean drinking water, electricity and a small amount of ash waste.

Gates documented a first-hand taste test of the OmniProcessor water on his blog on Monday.

"I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyor belt and drop into a large bin," he wrote in the post. "They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water.

"The water tasted as good as any I've had out of a bottle," he said.

The OmniProcessor is designed by Janicki Bioenergy and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in an ongoing effort to improve sanitation in developing countries. Gates says the OmniProcessor is designed to be an affordable, easy-to-maintain method of human waste disposal in countries that lack the infrastructure to put toilets into widespread use.

Gates' blog post includes a video of him inspecting the OmniProcessor device in November. The video features Gates alongside Janicki Bioenergy CEO Peter Janicki, who explains how the OmniProcessor works.

"The OmniProcessor turns sewer sludge which is kind of nasty into clean drinking water, electricity and ash, which is pathogen-free," Janicki says in the video.

The OmniProcessor carries feces up a conveyor belt and through a series of dryers, which boil off the liquid water contents as vapour. The dried waste is carried to a furnace, where it's burned to produce steam that drives an energy-producing generator. At the same time, the water vapour is sent through a cleaning system that turns it back into clean, drinkable water.

Janicki says entrepreneurs who use the OmniProcessor will be paid for the sewage they take in, and for the water and electricity they output.

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Watch Bill Gates sip 'delicious drinking water' that used to be human feces