Green Options

As far as I am concerned, the two biggest problems facing humanity are kicking our addiction to oil, and figuring out a way to get rid of all our garbage without stuffing it into big, endless holes in the ground.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could kill two birds with one stone? One day, we might be able to, but for now at least one company is working on a way to fix their fuel woes within the confines of their own business.

Waste Management, one of the biggest garbage companies in the country, says it will be able to produce 13,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) daily from just one landfill in Northern California.

The Trust-Us League. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck–environmental superheroes out to change the world on ecological-footprint at a time!

Gary Busey is a man of action. He’s taking his massive cow corks to the farm and putting an end to the madness — with the help of an assistant, an unwitting farmer and a few approachable, if displeased, cows.

For this the third entry in the annals of excellent excrement (after cow and E. coli poop), we will have to travel deep down into the heart of Texas…and then even farther down into the sewers of San Antonio. So don your rubber body suit, gas mask, and sense of humor, for sewage is no longer just stuff to be dumped and forgotten.

No, San Antonio is out to prove that sewage, and specifically the methane that it gives off oh so (i.e., too) naturally without any bother or cost to us, can be used as a source of alternative fuel…I mean it is natural gas, after all.

In an Associated Press story reported by CNN on its website on September 11, the San Antonio Water System plans to capture methane gas produced by the 140,000 tons of sewage it handles (sorry…bad word choice there) every year.1 Officials estimate that they will be able to capture as much as 900,000 cubic feet of methane annually from this big old pile of people poop.

But what do you do with nearly a million tons of methane? If you are a high school kid, you might get a matchbook and invite some friends with a camera for a rip-roaring laugh. If you are more mature and entrepreneurial officials in San Antonio, however, you sell that happy-crappy gas to Ameresco Inc., an energy-services company based in Massachusetts, for use as a fuel source.