The traditional way of dealing with the methane generated in the waste treatment is to burn it off – an utter waste. Why would anyone do this? Gas companies spend millions of dollars every year drilling and fracking to collect natural gas, which is mostly comprised of methane. By using anaerobic digesters sewage is converted into methane and the solids that are left over can be used for fertilizer or as building material. Next, the methane is sent to a plant to be further refined before it can be used for electricity.
New York City is about to start heating homes with methane from sewage. The Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant will add enough natural gas to the city’s network to heat 2,500 homes. New York’s 14 waste treatment plants already use about half of the methane gas that they produce to cover 20% of their energy needs. Now they are working to collect the other half of that methane to sell back to the grid. The U.K. has already started a program like this that heats 200 homes in Oxfordshire.
Methane can also be used to power cars. Take a look at this “Bio-Bug,” also developed in the U.K.; it runs on methane produced from poo.
If these types of ideas were incorporated throughout the U.S. the cost of sewage treatment as well as the amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted during the process would be greatly reduced. What could possibly be more green than using our own human waste as fuel to keep us warm in winter or to get us to work in the morning?
This is a picture of a manhole in Chicago. After being inundated by two massive storms within a short period of time the one hundred year old sewer beneath the manhole collapsed and brought a large portion of the street down with it. The manhole survived and was able to maintain its structural integrity because it had recently been relined using trenchless technology.
The City of Chicago has spent millions of dollars over the past few years in an effort to rehabilitate tens of thousands of manholes throughout the city. Digging up and replacing every manhole would have been cost prohibitive, but many of the manholes throughout the city were a century old and in bad condition. As an alternative they decided to reline the manholes with a concrete liner. The liners are expected to last another hundred years and if this picture is any indication they seem to be holding up pretty well. Read the full story here.
Almost any sewer repair can be done with little or no digging these days. It used to be that if you needed to have a repair done to a sewer that ran under your house you would have to dig up your entire basement and it would take days to dig, repair or replace the pipe, fill in and then return the basement to its original state. Now it can be done without digging if there is a cleanout or manhole access nearby or with a 3’ x 3’ hole outside of the house if there isn’t. The lining product that we use lasts as long as a traditional PVC pipe (about 50 years) and is impermeable to tree roots, meaning that you don’t have to sacrifice durability or longevity to utilize trenchless technologies.
Researchers at Penn State are developing a way to turn the water that you flush down your toilet into a fuel cell. At wastewater treatment plants bacteria feast on organic matter in the water breaking it down in the process. As the bacteria do there job electrons are released out into the air – and that is wasted energy.
What the researchers at Penn State have done is put the whole process into something that resembles a battery cell. When the bacteria are deprived of oxygen they instead release those electrons down a wire creating electricity.
So far they haven’t been able to create a cost effective way of doing this on a large scale, but if they can figure that out then our wastewater treatment plants will be producing energy for the grid instead of using it. It’s estimated that along with supplying enough energy for there own needs the treatment plants could power for about 80 homes.
One of the most exciting things about this is that you can use almost any type of wastewater as fuel. To me that sounds like we’re one step closer to the trash powered DeLorean we’ve always wanted.
The toilet is said to be the single most important invention for saving lives. Everything from cholera to hepatitis can be incubated and spread through feces. By removing human waste from the living area the spread of disease is greatly reduced. This is why having access to toilets and clean drinking water is so important. In many third world countries these basic hygienic standards are considered luxuries.
When it comes to sanitary waste many parts of the world face different challenges than western countries. Currently there are 2.6 Billion people without access to sanitary waste disposal. Without this infrastructure in place drinking and washing water are easily contaminated, making the spread of disease much more likely. Diseases that are easily curable in western countries can wreak havoc on nations that do not have the resources available to combat them. The problem is that the western style infrastructure, laying sewer lines that send waste to water treatment plants, is cost prohibitive for these countries. Composting toilets are great for rural areas but do not dispose of waste quickly enough to work in crowded third world cities where huge numbers of people need access to toilets.
With this in mind the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have funded an effort to redesign the toilet for these types of places. The toilet they are looking for is cheap, efficiently eliminates human waste, and requires little to no infrastructure to support it. This is a lot to ask but many grants have already been awarded. Some current ideas involve solar powered toilets that bake the waste to sanitize it while others use “cartridge” systems where waste can be hauled to a disposal site.
You can find more information at www.gatesfoundation.org or listen to an episode of NPR’s Talk of the Nation devoted to this topic.
Spirits were high the morning before our office Christmas party… everyone was to receive a Christmas gift of tetanus and hepatitis B vaccines! Once the bleeding stopped we fired up the grill and, all kidding aside, the mood brightened up.
It was pretty cold outside so we had to bring the party into our shop, but that didn’t stop us from having a feast. Dave Paulette, our V.P., manned the grill and cooked deer, pork oysters. We had two tables full of food – everything from BBQ and fried chicken to cookies and cakes. Mike Browning, our Shop Foreman, brought in his famous baked beans but those were gobbled up before half of us even knew they were on the table. We topped it off with a raffle for hams and gift cards.
It’s rare to have everyone under one roof since so many of our employees are constantly in the field so this was a great way for everyone to get together and relax. It was a great way to close out the year.
New York City is about to start heating homes with methane from sewage. The Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant will add enough natural gas to the city’s network to heat 2,500 homes. New York’s 14 waste treatment plants already use about half of the methane gas that they produce to cover 20% of their energy needs. Now they are working to collect the other half of that methane to sell back to the grid. The U.K. has already started a program like this that heats 200 homes in Oxfordshire.
