Green Options » poop

1,400 Pounds of Daily Elephant Poop is Put to Work at Miami Metrozoo

Rhishja Larson — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:54:03 +0000

Miami’s Metrozoo is recycling 1,400 pounds of elephant poop, 750 pounds of rhino dung, and 500 pounds of giraffe excrement per day.

In an innovative effort to save landfill space and reduce the zoo’s ecological footprint, the organic waste is used as fertilizer, and also to “decorate the zoo grounds.” In addition to the “big producers” - elephants, rhinos, and giraffes - other herbivores are regularly making their own contributions.

Metrozoo’s horticultural supervisor, Tom Trump, said that to recycle and reuse whatever they could “made sense.” Since starting the recycling project last year, the park has saved over $20,000.

Miami Metrozoo is home to over 1,000 animals, representing over 400 species - 48 of which are endangered species.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tiswango/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

The Twelve Days of sustainablog: Poop, Green Teeth, and Pimpin’ Your Ride

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 02:37:24 +0000

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

Caroline Savery declared that one of the top rules of living sustainbly is “Have fun!”
Zachary Shahan offered a new twist on “think global, act local”: sustainability starts at the inidividual level.
Mark Winstein answered the question “What is an investment product?”
Low Impact Living listed 10 Ways to Cut Home Energy Consumption.

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The Twelve Days of sustainablog: Bees, Stimulus Checks, and Biodynamic Wine

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:21:11 +0000

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:

Jason Phillip’s post on Chicago’s bottled water tax was one of our most popular ever… it’s still getting pageviews!
Maria Surma Manka wrote a very thorough (and also very popular) review of Scientific American’s “Solar Grand Plan.”
I took a look at an innovative South African whose developed a low-cost, high-yield method of generating energy from chicken poop.

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City to Pipe Biogas from Farms to Power Recycling Plant

Alex Felsinger — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:27:32 +0000

After years of debate and planning, the St. Paul, MN city council has voted unanimously to move forward with a unique plan to produce biogas from manure and ethanol waste in rural farms and pump it miles to power an enormous paper recycling plant.

The energy-efficiency of recycling paper is not the best, so this plan is a welcome alternative-fuel twist to the standard process.

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The First City in the U.S. to Make Natural Gas from Our Poop

Levi Novey — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:23:22 +0000

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.

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South African Farmer Pulls Power from Poop

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 02:02:13 +0000

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.

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Save the Rhinos!

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 11:43:30 +0000

Buy some rhino poop on eBay…

Celsias: Energy Bookshelf — The Power of Poop

Celsias — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 15:56:04 +0000

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 America is Shaped By Its Grossest National Product. That is an unusual reaction when reading something that, at its core, deals with a quite serious subject and deals with it well. And, that discomfort proves one of the core points of the book — about how American (and much of modern) culture seeks to suppress understanding and discussion of what is, at the end of the day (or whenever you hit the can or release gas or …), one of the most shared human experiences (after, perhaps, breathing …).

Reading this book provided an interesting experience, ranging from outright laughter to points that challenged thinking about daily activities to squeamish discomfort about the subject matter. I learned, in some ways too much, about feces and humanity’s relationship with it. Simply put, Poop Culture is a recommended read (and, if you wish, you can check out the website that started it all, PoopReport.com).

But this review, is about Energy … and, well, poop and energy and what we can learn from Poop Culture….

On consideration, there are several key arenas where Poop Culture relates to critical energy issues:

Sewage systems are a huge infrastructural investment, that take major energy investments to create and operate.
The system is quite wasteful in terms of resources and opportunities exist, in some ways, to turn this around toward a more fruitful energy path.
The sewage system is an excellent example of how decisions made decades, even century+ ago, related to infrastructure drive our choices today and into the future, constraining options. And, well, it is not just physical but cultural as well — our mental constructs sometimes constrain even more than the physical. (For example, how many of you recycle and do composting yet do not (as I do not) do Humanure using some form of a composting toilet?)

Think about the following, as Praeger discusses the infrastructure costs of "poop," opening with a discussion about a play in which every visit to a toilet had to be paid for,

"a hilariously terrifying universe in which peeing and pooping cost money

"It made you glad to live in a society where the most important things in life are free

"But they’re not. Glistening in the stark bathroom light, bobbing gently in the toilet bowl, framed by a chocolate halo on the water’s surface, your poop is unneeded by your body and unwanted by society. You need only flush to remove it from the consciousness of both. But the simplicity of that mechanism belies the intricacy of the infrastructure and the magnitude of the capital invested in the sanitary-industrial complex that makes it so easy. The effortlessness of pressing a little lever to remove a fresh poop from any bathroom anywhere in the country at any time of the day maybe be the birthright of every single American, but it is not free." [p. 90]

This an example of Praeger’s amusing and insightful style. And, he is raising an important point — just how many Americans consider the cost implications when they flush? Quite roughly, based on one analysis, the average household flush (from construction, to water, to toilet paper) costs $0.41 or a total cost of perhaps over $26,000 over an eight year period. [p. 93] As Praeger comments, "The financial cost of all this is staggering; just as shocking is the general ignorance of the cost."

This is all too similar to the question of Cost to Buy vs Cost to Own when it comes to energy. Do you ever consider the life-cycle cost of owning a toilet? I have to say it hasn’t been on the tip of my tongue for cocktail conversations….

But, this fiscal cost is really just the start. Due to how the sewage system works, the organic materials of human waste end up mixed (in general) with other wastes (toxic metals, chemicals, etc), making it difficult to safely return it to the environment. Contaminated sludge isn’t the most fruitful way to fertilize food for the kitchen table (sadly, there are many parts of the world where contaminated water/contaminated sludge is a principal source of irrigation water).

Yet, does it have to be?

Americans flush 108 million pounds of plant food down the toilet every day. … the US uses 12 billion tons of nitrogen fertilizer alone every year, 65 million pounds a day, 55% of it is imported. Our poop is being wasted.

Yes, our poop. We spend a huge amount of money, a huge amount of energy to support a sewage system that requires extensive amounts of clean water and ends up throwing out something that could be fruitfully used.

Praeger advocates composting, "the process through which bacteria and heat break down organic materials into humus." He then discusses composting toilets and The Humanure Handbook, discussing how some already are composting (and getting great vegetables from this soil).

But the foresightful and industrious few cannot avert the coming crisis. To drastically reduce our water usage and to stop contaminating our farmlands, we need a poop composting system that every American will use. It must accommodate city dwellers without backyards, the elderly and those who can’t lift 20-pound buckets, the lazy who would empty their bucket out the window to save a trip to the pile, and the indoctrinated — the vast majority, loyal to the institutions of fecal denial who would fight like hell in their refusal to deviate from it. It’s conceivable that society can be persuaded to accept a neighbor’s poop compost pile if it doesn’t smell or attract vermin, but it’s hard to imagine most Americans giving up their beloved porcelain thrones for sawdust-filled, manually-emptied five-gallon buckets.

The infrastructure challenge is huge — to figure out how to and then invest to shift from over a century of investments in the current (and planned) sewage system to something that doesn’t waste over 54,000 tons of plant food every day — and, concurrently, reducing water and energy use to match. But, compared to the social/cultural challenge, this daunting engineering challenge could be easy.

And, well, this is a parallel for the entire energy question. We can move toward a far more environmentally friendly and fiscally sound energy system, rather quickly, but the challenge is — in no small part — cultural. Are people ready to drive smaller cars or are SUVs an inalienable human rights issue? Ready to turn off some lights? Set the air conditioning at a higher temperature? Fly less frequently? As Royal Dutch Shell’s CEO wrote

More than half the energy we generate every day is wasted.

What’s the point of producing even more energy if we continue to waste most of it? Instead, we should aim to become twice as efficient in our use of energy by the middle of the next century. That is entirely feasible, provided that the will is there.

And, well, the same is true for our sewage system. We can move to a less wasteful, more sensible sewage system, "provided that the will is there." Sadly, based on the unease which readers encountered with Poop Culture, that will might be far away.

Sioux City, IA, Breaks Ground on "Poop to Profits" Plant

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 02:27:00 +0000

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 Journal,

The Bison Renewable facility will begin with 11 1-million-gallon tanks, or biogas regional anaerobic digesters (BRADs) and grow to 22 BRADs with an additional investment of about $7 million. Baumann said the technology has been widely used in Europe for about 18 years, but the largest plants there have just seven or eight comparable tanks.

The BRADs will be fed about 65 percent livestock manure with the rest of the feedstock being animal fats or vegetable waste from food processing. The glycerin left over from biodiesel production is also an excellent ingredient. The resulting methane could be used to produce electricity, but it won’t be.

“We are going to scrub out the impurities and then pump it into the (nearby Northern Natural Gas) pipeline,” [Chief Operations Manager Rob] Baumann said. He said that methane, which is odorless, will blend readily with the natural gas and meet or exceed its BTU levels.

The other byproduct, an inorganic manure residue, can be spread as fertilizer.

In case you’re wondering… the plants developers claim that local residents won’t have to suffer with massive pooh odors: “Baumann said the company will collect manure from livestock producers in sealed trucks which will be unloaded indoors, then used in a sealed process.”

I can’t see much to dislike here: get rid of massive amounts of manure from big cattle operations (which are also a problem in and of themselves, but that’s another post) that would otherwise leech into the water system, and release methane into the air. Turn it into a couple of useful products. Create a few jobs in the process (the plant will employ 75 people). Bring a few million into the county tax base. I suppose the only unanswered question is the energy input: does anyone have a sense of this? Do these plants divert some of the gas created to power themselves?

del.icio.us tags: poop, renewable, energy, methane, iowa

Poop Beneath Your Feet: A Good Thing?

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 03:10:00 +0000

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 to store shelves. And the resulting product smells just fine.

The researchers hope it could be part of the solution to the nation’s 1.5-trillion- to 2-trillion pound annual farm waste disposal problem.

Yep, the poop is piling up, and ranchers who once sold it to farmers for fertilizer now find they’ve got more of the smelly stuff than they can sell. Many have turned to methane digesters as a “win-win” solution for waste disposal and energy production, and now researchers are looking at ways to make use of the solid residue that’s left after methane and liquids are extracted. While some of the “digester solids” are used for animal bedding and potting soil, some labs are testing out a fibreboard product that seems to hold up as well, or even better, than its counterpart made from sawdust.

Obviously, there will be an image problem from the outset, and a representative of the Composite Panel Association believes the concept won’t fly. Of course, if the resulting product is marketed as “Poopboard,” he’s probably right. But it’s hard for me to see this as anything more than a marketing issue: if the material is sturdy and attractive, would the manufacturer need to proclaim “Made from Cow Manure?”

Via davidnode at Hugg

Categories: cows, poop, fibreboard, methanedigester, flooring, research, michigan, us