Georgia Tech Research Podcast: Generation II Reinvented Toilet

Nearly half of the world’s population lack access to modern sanitation. In recent years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has sought solutions to this problem.

Enter Georgia Tech Associate Professor Shannon Yee, Ph.D. He has led a project that is on the cusp of “reinventing” the toilet and alleviating this worldwide crisis.

Yee leads the Generation 2 Reinvented Toilet (G2RT) project. The G2RT team includes 70 engineers, scientists, and industrial designers from academic institutions and commercial/industrial entities from around the world.

The latest episode of the Georgia Tech Research Podcast presents updates on the team’s efforts directly from the mouths of some of those involved. This episode features Dr. Yee, as well as GTRI Senior Research Engineers Kyle Azevedo and Alexis Noel, both from the Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems (ATAS) Laboratory. In this podcast, host Scott McAtee talks to the engineers about their collaboration to reinvent the toilet and create a sanitation solution that requires no input water, transforms human waste into a safe byproduct, and does not require a sewer or septic connection.

Describing the scope of the problem and project, Yee says, “This would be a toilet in your home servicing an individual's family that would treat all of its waste on site without the need for output sewer or input water. Think of it as an appliance in your home that is replacing all of the infrastructure that you would have with a centralized sewage treatment center. So, all of the sewer pipes that connect your house to the centralized treatment plant, everything in the centralized treatment plant.”

Yee talks about his perhaps unorthodox view on the problem. “Personally, I look at the toilet and see it as a thermal energy conversion technology,” he says.

Azevedo and Noel are both members of the volume reduction variant team of the G2RT project. During the podcast episode, they talk about two variants they are working on that use different technologies.

The full podcast episode has Yee, Azevedo, and Noel go into detail about the many engineering challenges of the project and how they tackled them—or are trying to.

The episode is available here. It also is streaming on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, so you can listen to it—or any Georgia Tech Research Podcast episode—at your leisure.

Writer: Christopher Weems

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,800 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.