Bill Gates has partnered with a perfume company to create the ultimate poop smell blocker
The “anti-poop” scent is to function like a noise-cancelling headphone for poor countries
Bill Gates wasn’t sniffing “poop” for nothing.
As the billionaire philanthropist explains in a recent Gates Notes blog post, he recently spent time smelling an artificial scent of faeces in Geneva, Switzerland as part of a plan to help people in poor areas have an easier time using the bathroom.
In India and other poor countries, sanitation continues to be a problem — some 800,000 children under 5 die annually from diarrhoea or other sanitation-related ailments.
Although pit latrines give people a place to defecate, many smell so bad that people choose to go out in the open, which creates public-health threats by allowing bacteria and disease to spread.
Gates’ solution to this problem: Partner with Firmenich, a 120-year-old perfume company, to develop an “anti-poop” scent that masks bad odours in the same way noise-cancelling headphones use wave patterns to block noise.
Essentially, the perfume acts as a high-tech Febreze, blocking the receptors in your nose that cause you perceive bad odors. The hope is that the spraying the product in latrines will encourage people to use them, since the smell will no longer seem so offensive.
Developing this anti-poop scent was no small feat.
