June’s most often associated with weddings, summer vacations, and Father’s Day… as you can see by the headline, we went in some other directions that month, too.
Summer was here, and the living was sustainable… and here are some of our best efforts.
June 2008
2008 was a banner year for sustainablog, and we want to end it as strongly as we started. So, for the next twelve days, I’ll take a look back at some of the best and most memorable posts from the past year.
Let me start off, though, by expressing my immense gratitude to all of the writers who contributed during 2008. This was our first full year as a multi-author blog, and I couldn’t have been more pleased with the way it turned out. Some of the writers I’ll mention have moved on; others on coming on board. I’m grateful for the inspiration you’ve all brought to the blog over the past year, and look forward with anticipation to what the new year brings us.
January 2008
Like New Year’s fireworks, January started off with a bang. Here are a few great posts to remember:
By Alex Felsinger •
November 20, 2008
By Levi Novey •
September 11, 2008
San Antonio, Texas will be the first city in the United States to produce natural gas from the methane that comes from the poop of its residents on a large, profitable scale. Our excrement is being more technically referred to as “biosolids” by the companies and agencies involved in the project. And the project is by no means a joke.
Chicken poop ain’t pretty, but it’s potential as an energy source has a number of large-scale poultry operations taking a second look at the smelly stuff. The price tags on such projects can climb pretty high, though: Georgia’s Green Power EMC project, for instance, was projected to cost $20 million when announced in early 2006. These costs may make such projects prohibitive in the developing world, where they could raise living standards of impoverished people while helping them “leapfrog” over Western development patterns based on fossil fuels. South African farmer Shelby Tyne (shown above) believes he’s hit upon the cost-benefit sweet spot for this technology: for $37,000 dollars, Tyne and partner Derrick Hilton have built a biogas plant that powers the entire farm… without even pushing maximum capacity.
Tyne tells the story of the biogas plant in this Facebook video (note: you do have to be a member of Facebook to watch it). His and Hilton’s Greenways Farm had taken chicken poop off of a neighboring farmer’s hands for a number of years to use as fertilizer, but stockpiling the litter created pollution problems. Tyne’s solution: put the poop into methane digesters, and use the resulting gas as fuel for both cooking stoves and a generator. He quickly figured out that with the amount of chicken litter they normally used, the farm could create 11,000 kW h of electricity per month: more than three times what it normally consumed. On paper, the project looked like a no-brainer.
By Celsias •
October 13, 2007
Editor’s note: Our weekly post swap with Celsias continues with a subject most people would rather not discuss: poop. Celsias writer A. Siegel reviews Dave Praeger’s book Poop Culture, and muses on the waste involved in dealing with our wastes. This post was originally published on October 11, 2007.
To carry the book openly or to stash it away, that is a question one faces when reading Dave Praeger’s Poop Culture: How
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So, those of you who’ve been around for a while know that I couldn’t pass this one up: yesterday, Minneapolis-based Bison Renewable Energy broke ground on what will be the world’s largest methane gas facility in Sioux City, Iowa. When the plant begins operations early next year, it will hold up to 11 million gallons of cow manure, and turn that yucky stuff into methane gas. According to the Siouxland Business [...]
Generally not, but that could change if research being conducted by the University of Michigan and the US Department of Agriculture is successful. The task: developing flooring (and other products) from cow poop…. really!
[Researchers] say that fiber from processed and sterilized cow manure could take the place of sawdust in making fiberboard, which is used to make everything from furniture to flooring
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