2025-08-21 20:13:44
Kim Jong-ho, CEO of With Masters, explains eco-friendly toilets to Gates Foundation officials who visited Korea last month. With Masters
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and chairman of the Gates Foundation, who is visiting Korea, met with With Masters, a small and medium-sized sanitary and environmental company.
Withmasters is a small and medium-sized company that is creating prototypes in Gates’ “green toilet” project to improve health in underdeveloped countries.
According to With Masters on the 21st, Gates and Kim Jong-ho, CEO of With Masters, met in Yeouido, Seoul, on the afternoon of the same day.
“We reported on the latest HRT (Household Reinvented Toilet) model that we are developing in cooperation with the Gates Foundation,” CEO Kim said in a phone call with Maeil Economy.
CEO Kim is an engineer who served as the head of Samsung Electronics’ global quality innovation office and the president of set manufacturing, and developed 100% wastewater recycling technology when he worked at Samsung, and the Gates Foundation has applied it to health projects in poor countries.
HRT, which is being developed by With Masters, is a sewage treatment system with sedimentation, oxygen foaming, microbial decomposition, filtering, and debris drying functions, and is a new concept toilet that does not require sewage treatment facilities. It is installed in homes and facilities in areas that do not have sewage pipes to self-purify and recycle or discharge sewage. The key is to filter lumps such as feces through sedimentation in toilet sewage and then make them into non-toxic grains through a 750-degree ultra-high temperature drying process. Water is purified to the level of medium water through microbial decomposition and filtering.
Since 2011, the Gates Foundation has invested $400 million (about 590 billion won) to improve toilets and sewage facilities to combat waterborne diseases in underdeveloped countries, one of which is the commercialization of HRT.
Earlier, the director of the Gates Foundation, Duray Conn, who visited Korea in March, met with Mail Business and praised With Masters, saying, “I have done what I have done over three to four years in other countries in nine months.”
Reporter LEE Yunsik (leeyunsik@mk.co.kr)
– ⓒmydaily (www.mk.co.kr)