RTI International project to reinvent the toilet featured in photo book

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — RTI International’s project to reinvent the toilet will be featured in a new photographic documentary book on the toilet. 

The book, titled FLUSH: Celebrating Bathrooms Past & Present, explores bathroom history, culture and technology through a series of photos and narratives. The book features a description of the scope of the global sanitation problem, a summary of RTI’s toilet development project and a photo showing three members of the RTI team behind one of their waste processing units. RTI staff members included in the photo are Brian Stoner, Dayle Johnson and Ethan Klem. 

In 2012, RTI, in partnership with Duke and Colorado State University, was awarded a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Reinvent the Toilet Challenge to help improve sanitation in the developing world by developing a toilet that could disinfect liquid waste, dry and burn solid waste and convert the resulting combustion energy into stored electricity, all at a cost of less than 5 cents (U.S.) per user per day. The project received additional funding in 2013 to further develop and transition the prototype system for testing in India. 

The author wrote “The most pressing challenge in the world of FLUSH is neither improving toilet efficiency nor wastewater treatment. It’s helping the 2.5 billion people in the world who lack access to basic sanitation and saving some of the 1.5 million children who die every year as a result."

Flush, by Steve Gottlieb, will be available in February on leading bookseller websites.