The iThrone waterless toilet (a sanitation device born from NASA research) has now reached 20,000 households across Uganda, Panama, and the United States, offering a practical answer to a problem that affects roughly 1 billion people worldwide who live beyond the reach of plumbing and sewage systems.
From space stations to communities without plumbing
Diana Yousef was working as a consultant on spaceborne sanitation when the connection became clear. The requirements for a toilet that functions on a space station (no running water, no sewage pipes, no infrastructure to speak of) are, she realised, identical to the requirements for a toilet that could serve communities in rural, low-income parts of the world. Both astronauts and those communities face the same fundamental constraint: waste cannot simply be flushed away.
The result was the iThrone, a standalone, non-flushing unit that rapidly evaporates 95% of the water content in urine and excrement. The remaining solid matter is reduced to a fraction of its original volume, making disposal in areas without waste infrastructure both possible and far safer than the alternatives. The design is straightforward and replicable, and the units can be dropped or trucked into almost any environment without requiring a connection to existing systems.
Yousef’s academic background spans Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard. According to EL PAÍS English, she holds a PhD in Biochemistry from Cornell, a foundation that shaped how she approached the chemistry of waste evaporation at the heart of the iThrone’s technology.
iThrone waterless toilet sanitation draws two major awards
Recognition has followed the technology from two different directions. Yousef received this year’s Global Citizen Waislitz Awards prize for advancing innovative solutions to large-scale challenges. The award carries $100,000 to help her startup, change:WATER, expand distribution and bring the iThrone to more communities. Yousef has written that winning will allow change:WATER to scale iThrone distribution to millions more by next year.
Before that, in May, the iThrone received the MAPFRE Foundation Award for Social Innovation in the category of Health Improvement and Digital Technology, according to EL PAÍS English. That recognition pointed to the same quality that has driven the project from the start: a low-complexity intervention addressing a high-stakes public health problem.
The scale of that problem is worth stating plainly. Around 1 billion people worldwide live without access to adequate sanitation. The consequences reach well beyond discomfort: waterborne disease, soil contamination, and the dangers that come when communities have no safe way to manage human waste. Portable, infrastructure-free units like the iThrone do not solve every dimension of that challenge, logistics, affordability, and long-term maintenance all remain real considerations, but they lower the barrier to entry in ways that piped sewage systems, which require sustained capital investment and stable infrastructure, simply cannot.
Cost is one area where Yousef has been direct. EL PAÍS English reports that she estimates the final price of the iThrone will be around $200 per unit. At that price point, wide deployment in low-income settings still depends on subsidies, partnerships, or aid mechanisms, but it also puts the technology within range of discussions about public health procurement in ways that more expensive solutions do not.
The change:WATER startup is now positioned to translate the awards, the attention, and the $100,000 prize into a significantly larger rollout. With deployments already running across three countries and a target of reaching millions more, the iThrone waterless toilet sanitation effort moves into its next phase with a tested product and a clear goal.
