Inventor Envisioned a Waterless Toilet for Astronauts, Realized it Could Solve a Global Sanitation Crisis Instead
Inventor Diana Yousef has developed the 'iThrone,' a waterless toilet designed for space travel that is now being used to address sanitation crises in rural areas. The startup, change:WATER, plans to scale distribution with the help of a recent award grant.
Why it matters
Innovative space-based technology is providing practical, sustainable solutions for global sanitation challenges.
An inventor and serial entrepreneur has created a non-flushing, waterless toilet that’s already making sanitation safer and accessible for some 20,000 households,
Deployed in Uganda, Panama, and the United States, the ‘iThrone’ was created when Diana Yousef was working at NASA on spaceborne sanitation.
While brainstorming bathrooms on board space stations, Yousef realized that the requisites for a toilet that works in space were the same for those who live beyond the reach of plumbing and sewage down on Earth—the fate of some 1 billion people worldwide.
Like astronauts, they cannot simply flush away their waste with water down pipes into a sewage system, and so Yousef created a toilet that doesn’t require any.
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