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"IF Thomas Crapper were around today, he would find our toilets quite familiar," says Bill Gates, referring to the Victorian manufacturer of sanitary ware whose name has become attached to one of the body's most fundamental functions. "They haven't seen many advances apart from handles and paper toilet rolls." In fact, with the exception of S-traps to contain odours, flush toilets have changed little since Sir John Harington installed one in Richmond Palace for Queen Elizabeth I.
比爾蓋茨提起衛生潔具制造商維多利亞時說道："如果今天湯馬斯·克拉普在這里，他一定會發現我們的馬桶很熟悉。"一談起維多利亞時代湯馬斯·克拉普這個名字，就很容易聯想到身體的最基本功能之一。比爾蓋茨還談到："與湯馬斯·克拉普時代相比，這些馬桶除了在把手和廁紙卷筒上有所改進，其他并沒有太多改進。"事實上，除了應用s形下水管存水彎存儲臭氣，抽水馬桶自約翰·哈靈頓爵士為女王伊麗莎白一世在里士滿宮安裝了抽水馬桶起幾乎未發生改變。
Mr Gates considers it time for a change. On August 14th his charitable institution, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced the gold-, silver- and bronze-medal winners in its Reinvent The Toilet Challenge, which aims to bring safe, affordable and "sustainable" loos to the 40% of the world's population who lack access to basic sanitation, thus preventing many of the 1.5m childhood deaths from diarrhoea that now occur each year.
蓋茨先生認為現在是時候做一些改變了。8月14日，他的慈善機構--比爾與梅琳達.蓋茨基金會宣布舉行徹底改造馬桶挑戰的活動，并設立金牌、銀牌、銅牌的獎項。該活動意在為世界40%缺乏基本衛生設備的人口提供安全、實惠、耐用的廁所。現今，每年因腹瀉死亡的兒童人數為150萬。而這樣的舉措能防止很多這樣的孩子死亡。
The Challenge is nothing if not ambitious. It seeks a toilet that costs less than five cents per user per day to operate, that requires neither a supply of clean water nor sewerage infrastructure to take the waste away, and that will generate energy and recover salts, water and other nutrients. Remarkably, despite the challenge being little more than a year old, the award winners claim to be on track to achieve all of these goals.
這樣的挑戰是極其雄心勃勃的。它致力于建造一個每天每次不超過5分的廁所。這樣的廁所不依靠清潔的水也不依靠排水設備來排污，在產生能量的同時還能提取鹽分、水分和其他營養物質。更引人注目的是，這項挑戰在一年內就完成了，而且獎項的獲得者都如之前所定的那樣達到了所有的目標。
In third place is a toilet designed by researchers at the University of Toronto. This treats urine and faeces separately, using a material freely available in many of the world's poorest regions: sand. Urine is filtered through sand, and the resulting liquor is exposed to ultraviolet light to sterilise it. Faeces are dried slowly within the toilet before being fed into a smouldering sand-filled reactor. The system can sanitise the waste of ten people in two hours, leaving only sand and fresh(ish) water behind.
位列第三名的廁所設計者為多倫多大學的研究員們。該廁所將尿液和排泄物分開處理。所使用的材料即使很多最貧窮的地區也能大量的獲得，這種材料就是沙子。尿液經過沙子過濾，所產生的液體再經過紫外線殺菌。排泄物則在廁所里慢慢的變干，填充進一個裝滿沙子的低溫干餾反應器。這個系統能在兩個小時內給十個人的排泄物進行衛生處理，最后只留下沙子和干凈的水。
The runner-up, from Loughborough University in Britain, brings chemical-engineering principles to bear. A tank feeds mixed urine and faeces through a rig that heats it to 200°C under high pressure, killing pathogens. Returning the superheated mixture suddenly to atmospheric pressure causes it to separate into its liquid and gaseous components. The gas is used to heat the feed tank. The liquid is fed into a digester that produces enough methane to power the entire system—and some to spare.
亞軍來自英國的拉夫堡大學，他們應用的是化學工程原理。尿液和排泄物都存儲在一個容器中，在高壓下利用一個儀器將它加熱到200°C，這樣就能殺死致病菌。將高溫處理的混合物迅速置于大氣壓下，使之分離成液體和氣態顆粒。氣體用來加熱最初的供給容器，而液體則加入蒸煉器中產生的沼氣除了足夠為整個系統供能外，還有剩余。
The winning toilet, however, is smarter still. It has been developed by Michael Hoffman of the California Institute of Technology, and has earned him the $100,000 first prize. Dr Hoffman's toilet uses solar panels to power an electrochemical system that produces two things. One is hydrogen. The other is a compound which oxidises the salts in urine to generate chlorine. This creates a mildly disinfecting solution that can be used to flush the toilet. The hydrogen is suitable for cooking or for powering a fuel cell to produce electricity. The solid residue from the process can be employed as fertiliser.
冠軍廁所也更為智能。它是由加州理工學院的邁克爾·霍夫曼開發的，并未它的開發者賺入了10萬美元的一等獎獎金。霍夫曼博士的廁所是由太陽能電池板為一個電化學系統供能的。這樣一來會產生兩種物質：一種是氫氣，另一種是化合物能氧化尿液中的鹽分，產生氯。它能產生一種溫和的消毒液來沖洗廁所。而氫氣則能夠被用來烹飪或給燃料電池充電產生電能。而整個過程產生的固體殘渣則可以用做化肥。
The Gates Foundation will now pay for prototypes to be tested in the field, probably of all three winners and possibly of some other ideas, and Mr Gates hopes that the foundation's reinvented toilets will start being deployed for real in as little as two years. They will thus be able to contribute to achieving what is the most off-track of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to basic sanitation. As the chairman of the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation, the Prince of Orange, observes, "politicians and leaders worldwide don't like to be associated with toilets, even state-of-the-art toilets. This sanitation stigma distorts international and national development agendas."
現在，蓋茨的基金會就會為這些技術雛形付以報酬來進行該領域的試驗，這些技術雛形有可能是前三甲，也有可能是其他的設計。蓋茨先生希望由基金會徹底改造的廁所會在兩年內正式投產。他們也能因此為聯合國千年發展目標做出最不尋常（最離經叛道？）的貢獻,在2015年使不能持續享受基本衛生設備的人口減少一半。聯合國秘書長顧問委員會水與衛生部主席奧倫治公評價道："全世界的政治家和領導人并不愿意讓自己和廁所聯系在一起，即使是最先進的廁所。正是這樣一種關于衛生的特性讓國際和國家的發展計劃都產生了扭曲。"
Dr Hoffman agrees that sanitation is insufficiently sexy. He says the technology behind his winning solar-powered toilet had been sitting on the shelf since he demonstrated it to NASA, America's space agency, in the early 1990s, for use on the International Space Station. "It is," as he puts it, "hard to get a scientific grant for treating faeces."
霍夫曼博士也認為衛生事業不是那么吸引人。他表示，他曾于1990年初將他的太陽能供能廁所向美國宇航局，美國國家航空和宇宙航行局進行展示以供他們在國際空間站中使用，但是這樣的技術之后就被擱置了。他表示："要在處理排泄物上得到科學基金是很難的。"
Even the Gates Foundation itself, which hands out around $3 billion each year, has so far devoted just $6.5m to its Reinventing The Toilet Challenge. But that will change as the project goes from conception to delivery. The foundation now intends to spend up to $80m a year on sanitation, an investment that the World Health Organisation estimates will produce a return of 900% in the form of social and economic benefits coming from increased productivity and reduced health care costs.
即使是蓋茨基金會本身至今也盡投入了650萬美元用于徹底改造廁所的挑戰，而基金會每年的慈善基金花費在30億元左右。但是這個項目從一個觀念到實際交付，這樣的的情況就會改觀。當前，該基金會意欲每年在衛生上的投資加大至八千萬美元。投資后，預計國際衛生組織會在社會和經濟效益方面獲得9倍的收益，不僅它的生產能力會提高，它的衛生保健成本也會下降。
