Sewers Are Clogged Everywhere. Can Robots Help Clean Them? | World Wide Waste | Insider Business

legs four cameras and a carbon fiber body capable of lifting over 250 pounds a retractable hose and articulating shovel can access places that previously only human hands could reach hands like those of full Kumar mondal who used to jump into manholes before he got a job operating the robot foreign the Bandicoot is part of a wave of robots maintaining cities mostly unseen but absolutely critical infrastructure

and that's good news because clogs aren't only a problem in South Asia [Applause] pipes are stopped up everywhere including some of the global North's richest cities well fast she's gonna stick to that it's going to get bigger and bigger and Coke up yeah so why are sewers around the world getting so much worse and what can cities do to prevent from drowning in worldwide waste first

can we just take a minute to appreciate the miracle that you can wake up walk four steps do your business and flush it far far away many early civilizations had opened sewers in the streets and up until a few hundred years ago people oftentimes just threw their waste out the window things didn't start to change until the Industrial Revolution as city populations exploded and a deadly

disease started to spread around the world cholera killed millions of people over the course of the 19th century it's a real nasty way to die diarrhea and vomiting until the body runs out of fluids it took decades for science to reach a consensus that the pathogen spreads through water and how'd they Solve IT beer scientist Jon Snow noticed that in one neighborhood those who drank beer

rather than water from a contaminated well survived an epidemic by the late 1800s the world's largest cities kicked off massive sewer building projects the designs were grandiose and kind of beautiful in Paris the sewers became a tourist attraction nowadays much of the world's population relies on an unseen network of pipes and tunnels to carry away their waste all sewer systems rely simply on gravity in the

modern era the biggest innovation has been the addition of pumps that can help the sewage flow uphill that's it the most important technology in City Planning hasn't changed that much in hundreds of years and there is the problem cities grow but their sewers can't keep up when the London sewers were being built in the 1800s sir Joseph boselget doubled their size from the original designs smart

move but now the poop is hitting the fan as are the used cooking oil baby wipes and other things that people flush but sewers were not designed to handle and shifting climate patterns mean that cities regularly get hit with heavier rains and rising sea levels all that water can cause sewers to back up into the streets so cities have to build bigger and bigger tunnels that

come with a huge price tag in many cities in India it's cheaper to find people willing to unclog faulty pipes by hand even though this work has been illegal since 2013. abolishing manual Scavenging is what inspired the founders of gen robotics the company claims that robots like the Bandicoot will actually end up being cheaper over time and eliminate the danger for workers the four co-founders didn't

set out to clean sewers though they started out making robotic exoskeletons in college we felt the the limitation of a human can be drastically improved using technology so we can do extraordinary stuffs like Iron Man they shifted their focus after a deadly sewer accident near their school the sanitation workers are working inside the manhole they fell unconscious and in order to help them this autorussia driver

also tried and he also fell unconscious and died going from Iron Man suits to sewer robots wasn't easy the first challenge understanding India's old and complex sewer systems the second problem the manual scavengers feared this invention would put them out of work they know that we are going to build a robotic device for doing their job and they are really scared of letting this job go

away even though everybody say this is an inhuman task nobody like to do it research shows that 80 percent of Indian sewage workers die before the age of 60 because of health problems gen robotics set out to educate thousands of scavengers on the dangers of their job while also hiring some of them to operate the Bandicoot Ed now the company is up and running with almost

300 robots and 18 out of India's 28 States sewers in India are especially bad because its dated systems can't keep up with the booming population according to India's Central Pollution Control Board fewer than half of the country's centralized sewers work effectively Bandicoot robots get to a cleanup site on the back of a truck unlike when they go underground without protection the crews now wear hard hats

high visibility vests gloves and boots now the only manual part of the process they still do is removing the manhole cover once the unit is in place operators use the control panel to lower what they call the spider into a manhole the arms help guide it while cameras give the operator a close-up view so this thing works similar to a human hand like eight grabs waste

it collects waste and the bucket comes to close it and the waste is being taken to the top sensors check for poisonous gas and trigger an alarm if conditions are dangerous manually cleaning is not only dangerous it's also slow typically teams of three to five scavengers could only clean two manholes per day for operating the Bendigo robot only two people is required they can clean up

to 12 manifolds India is home to 1.4 billion people in Mumbai the country's largest city has around 22 million people and there are dozens of other gigantic cities in India the sewers in each one vary so that means gen robotics is always tweaking its designs that every bandicoat is being custom made like what uh Mumbai needs is not about Calcutta needs today a gen robotics plant

in palakkad three bandicoots will roll off the assembly line normally we take like four to ten days to assemble one robot with the same amount of Manpower like four to ten people cutting bending steel pipes and Welding almost every step of production gets done in-house every part must meet the exact specs for city sewer system the software and design teams know the Bandicoot's operators might be

former manual scavengers with little education so they did their best to keep things simple we actually worked with the Google and created a beautiful user interface system for doing this Jen robotics spent two years developing the Bandicoot before deploying it in the field workers assembled a frame housing the controls and the robotic spider arm one bolt and wire at a time all the sensitive Electronics have

to be waterproofed building by hand slows assembly time but the company says it's the only way to ensure quality control General robotics plans to standardize production eventually in order to scale up it's not an achievement but it's kind of a what a blessing we got to serve the society but even maintained by Innovative technology sewers everywhere are failing why first of all the list of things

that people flush has gotten longer over the years more wet wipes food and cooking oil enter the system than ever before underground their powers combine to create the Unholy monsters known as fatburgs masses of inorganic materials in Greece that can block entire tunnels fatbergs prompted politicians around the world to discourage or even ban non-flushable wipes so far these laws have failed to make an impact in

2021 California passed a law that merely required the makers of sanitary wipes to label their products with a do not flush warning and in the UK lawmakers are pushing a total ban on selling drain clogging plastic wipes it's their third try in five years secondly the huge fixes that some places need are getting way more expensive for example when it was first built the London sewer

system cost nearly 400 million pounds adjusted for inflation back then London's population sat at just 2.6 million people now nine million residents flush more than at any time in history the city is completing a 15-mile underground tunnel to transport overflow to treatment plants instead of dumping it into the Thames this single project cost almost 5 billion pounds 10 times the cost to build the entire sewer

system in the 19th century and thirdly we've entered a new era of climate change with heavier storms that test sewer capacity more often New York City sewers handle both Wastewater and storm runoff every time a thunderstorm hits the city the storm drains can back up spilling billions of gallons of raw sewage into waterways every year and the flooding can be deadly in 2022 11 people drowned

in their homes when severe rains overwhelmed the sewer system so it seems that no matter what cities do they'll never be able to keep up with their own crap the Modern Marvel of flush toilets opened a Pandora's box of problems right under our feet but there are alternatives historically Farmers came into cities and paid for human waste to turn it into fertilizer startups are looking into

recycling urine to return nutrients to soil and dry composting toilets are a proven way to let waste break down without water so the next time you have to go just think about where what you flush away might end up foreign [Music]