As blogged on Forbes.com, when you can’t flush it, vaporize it. A company called change:WATER Labs is developing an alternative to flushing waste called the iThrone. It’s described as a portable, space-saving, waste-shrinking toilet that eliminates up to 95% of daily waste on-site. It’s designed for dwellings and communities that lack power or plumbing. And it just snagged funding from the MIT Solve initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The solution has been in the works for about six years, the company says. This fall, change:WATER Labs plans to conduct its first pilot deployment in a district school and hospital in Uganda, providing sanitation to 500-1,000 people.

How It Works

“Using a breathable membrane to soak up and evaporate (or “flush away”) the liquid content of daily waste, not only does the iThrone NOT consume or pollute water, but it actually converts waste INTO clean water (vapor),” the team explains on an MIT Solve page.

“By containing and eliminating unflushed waste, the iThrone will help clean up communities. The iThrone is an ideal drop-in solution to provide immediately safe sanitation at low-cost to more people—in slums, camps and transitional communities. By shrinking sewage, the iThrone drastically cuts waste management/collection costs while increasing toilet-access and servicing capacity.”

In technical terms, the company describes the membrane as “a shrink wrap for crap” that dehydrates human waste without the need for external power or heat. It runs off of a “pee-powered” bio battery that converts urine into electricity that powers a fan to eliminate odors.

There are other container-based toilets, iThrone developers say, but this one only needs to be emptied once or twice a month as opposed to every one or two days.

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