Problems Too Disgusting to Solve

The New Yorker: 

Early last month, Bill Gates released a video of one of the latest ventures funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: the Omniprocessor, a Seattle-based processing plant that burns sewage to make clean drinking water. In the video, Gates raises a glass of water to his lips. Just five minutes ago, the caption explains, that water was human waste. Gates takes a sip. “It’s water,” he says. “Having studied the engineering behind it,” he writes, on the foundation’s blog, “I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”

According to the Gates Foundation’s estimates, at least two billion people lack access to proper sanitation; a 2012 intelligence community report to the State Department warned that, within the next decade, “many countries important to the United States will experience water problems—shortages, poor water quality, or floods—that will risk instability and state failure.” The Omniprocessor’s approach seems to be the perfect solution. It offers proper waste disposal in place of contamination, and clean drinking water where access is lacking. In fact, the technology has been around for years, and its efficacy is an established fact. So why hasn’t it been widely adopted yet?

That’s precisely the question that Paul Rozin, along with Brent Haddad, Carol Nemeroff, and Paul Slovic, tackled in a series of studies spanning more than two thousand American adults and several hundred college students. The results were published, in January, in the journal Judgment and Decision Making. “The problem isn’t making the recycled water but getting people to drink it,” Rozin told me recently. “And it’s a problem that isn’t going to be solved by engineers. It will be solved by psychologists.”

Read the whole story: The New Yorker