And its purpose is very important
He has posed on the side of the world's greatest leaders, but to this day he has never appeared in public holding a container full of feces.
The reason for the American billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, who did this feat today in Beijing. Its aim: to draw attention to the absence of toilets in developing countries.
"In places where there are no sanitary facilities, there is a lot more than there is," Gates said, pointing to the container next to him, addressing a forum on the future of toilets in the world.
"When children go out to play, they are exposed to it all the time," the American billionaire complained. "It is not just a matter of quality of life, it is linked to disease, death and malnutrition," he said.
During this forum, Bill Gates presented a futuristic toilet that does not need water or a sewer system and uses chemicals to turn human feces into compost.
This toilet, which according to him, is ready for sale after years of research, is a creation of research projects funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There are various toilet designs, but they all work by separating liquids from solid feces.
"The toilets that exist now simply remove feces in the water, while these toilets do not need a sewer system. "They take both liquids and solids and process them chemically, in most cases they burn them," Gates told Reuters.
According to Unicef, almost 900 million people do not have a toilet and are forced to use the countryside. In India, 150 million people still do not have toilets, compared to 550 million in 2014, according to New Delhi.
Poor health kills half a million children under the age of five each year and costs more than $ 200 billion a year worldwide, according to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
This is the first time the Foundation has participated in an event in China where President Xi Jinping is launching a three-year "toilet revolution" to build or upgrade 64.000 public toilets by 2020 to boost tourism and economic development.
Gates explained that the next step for the project will be to promote the idea of the new toilet to the manufacturers, estimating that the market for them will exceed 6 billion by 2030.