Bill Gates fulfilled a curse of the ages recently when he visited Janicki Bioenergy, an engineering firm based north of Seattle. In his own words:

“I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyer belt and drop into a large bin. They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water.”

Yup, you got it right: Bill Gates drank feces water.

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Bill Gates looking uncomfortable YouTube

More than 700 million people still lack ready access to drinking water, says the World Health Organization, while more than one third of the globe’s population, roughly 2.5 billion people, have no access to safe sanitation.

The new waste treatment machine known as the Janicki OmniProcessor, then, would kill two birds with one stone. The strange looking apparatus, one part steam engine, two parts water filtration system, can convert up to 14 tons of sewage into potable water with electricity to spare (and sent back to the community) each day.

While the original prototype was funded by seed money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, an even better model is on the horizon. The next-generation processor will be able to accommodate waste from 100,000 people, says Gates, resulting in 86,000 liters of potable water each day with 250 kw of extra electricity (the power to turn on 2,500 light bulbs of 100 watts each). Watch the YouTube video and see for yourself.