The new coating, called liquid-entrenched smooth surface (LESS), consists of two layers. And everyone wants the toilet to be clean,” says Penn State materials scientist Tak-Sing Wong, senior author of the study, published on Monday in Nature Sustainability. “We think this can have a big impact, because everyone needs to use the toilet. The novel veneer is also antibacterial, which, the researchers say, would reduce a main cause of bathroom odors and lower, by 90 percent, the amount of cleaning material needed to keep toilets sanitary. The researchers say it is more effective than existing hydrophobic, or water-repellent, coatings for toilets, which shed liquid waste well but are less effective for solids. Now a team of materials scientists at Pennsylvania State University has developed a promising potential solution: an ultraslippery coating that prevents liquid and solid waste from sticking to the toilet bowl, halving the amount of water needed to flush. Credit: Jing Wang and Tak-Sing Wong Penn State Droplets that linger on a standard glazed toilet bowl ( bottom) slip rapidly off a surface coated with LESS ( top). But according to Carl Hensman, a senior program officer at the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene program at the Gates Foundation, even the fanciest new throne has to contend with the more fundamental problem of “improving antifouling”-preventing waste from sticking to toilet surfaces. Most of the participants have focused on redesigning toilets as high-tech devices that can, for example, run on solar power or turn human waste into affordable energy and clean water. To design more sustainable facilities, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched a Reinvent the Toilet Challenge several years ago. Like a number of other researchers, he believes that minimizing the amount of water necessary for cleaning each toilet would increase access to sanitation. “Many parts of the world don’t have flushing toilets because they just don’t have the water required to operate them,” says Peter Lillehoj, an engineer at Michigan State University.
But water scarcity-a worsening problem in many low-resource environments-is one factor that makes it difficult to meet the need for clean, functioning toilets. About 2.4 billion people worldwide lack access to adequate toilet facilities, and hundreds of children die every day from preventable, sanitation-related diarrheal diseases.
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