Samsung Electronics Holds Closing Ceremony for the ‘RT (Reinvent the Toilet) Project’
Technology Developments Including Improved Drive Energy Efficiency and Achieving Discharge Water Purification Capability
Samsung Electronics announced that on August 25, it held the closing ceremony for the ‘RT (Reinvent the Toilet) Project’ at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), which it had been carrying out in cooperation with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (hereinafter the Gates Foundation).
SAIT has been cooperating with the Gates Foundation on RT development since 2019, and after three years of research and development, it recently completed the development of the RT component technologies and succeeded in user testing.
Attendees at the RT development cooperation closing ceremony included Kinam Kim (President), Head of SAIT; executives and staff who participated in the RT Project; Doulaye Kone, Deputy Director of the Gates Foundation; Sun Kim, who is in charge of RT at the Gates Foundation; and Yongjae Lee, an outside advisor to the Gates Foundation.
On Tuesday the 16th, Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee met with Bill Gates, Chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who was visiting Korea, to share the results of the RT Project development and to exchange views on global social contribution activities.
During the meeting, Chairman Bill Gates explained the vision of the Gates Foundation and the status of the social contribution activities currently under way, and Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee expressed his intention to contribute to solving humanity’s difficult challenges with Samsung’s technology.
Meanwhile, Samsung plans to license the patents for the RT Project technology it developed free of charge in the process of commercialization for underdeveloped countries, and even after the RT Project concluded on August 25, it plans to continue providing consulting support to the Gates Foundation for mass production. The RT Project is a new-concept sanitary toilet dissemination project that the Gates Foundation has been pursuing for underdeveloped countries since 2011.
In underdeveloped countries that lack water and sewage treatment facilities, toilets are not properly equipped, so more than roughly 900 million people relieve themselves outdoors, and the resulting water pollution causes more than 360,000 children under the age of five to die each year from diarrheal diseases and other illnesses.
To solve these problems, the Gates Foundation has been pursuing the development and commercialization of a new-concept toilet that requires no separate water or sewage treatment facilities since 2011.
World-renowned research institutes and universities that received financial support from the Gates Foundation attempted to realize the RT, but they faced technical challenges and difficulties in achieving a cost level that would allow mass production; accordingly, the foundation asked Samsung to participate in RT development in 2018.
After being briefed on the Gates Foundation’s RT Project, Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee instructed SAIT to form a task force for technology development, and he followed up on the progress with Bill Gates through email, phone calls, and video conferences. Accordingly, from 2019 Samsung began work on △basic design, △component and module technology development, △performance implementation, and △prototype development for mass production, in order to realize a household RT.
Through three years of research and development, Samsung succeeded in △improving drive energy efficiency and △securing discharge water purification capability, and it also succeeded in developing component technologies that satisfy the Gates Foundation’s effluent and exhaust gas requirements, including △reducing exhaust gas emissions, △improving durability, and △miniaturizing the RT. Using heat treatment and bio technologies, Samsung developed technology that discharges effluent that is harmless to the environment, and it achieved a 100% treated-water recycling rate.
The household RT developed based on Samsung’s technology has even completed testing with actual users, and the Gates Foundation plans to provide it, after an efficiency-optimization process for mass production, to underdeveloped countries that have no or poor sewage facilities and that lack water.