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?
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.
Like Energy Star, WaterSense is an EPA backed program specifically aimed at water conservation. This program provides consumers with an information resource and an easy way to spot water efficient products like faucets, showerheads and toilets via the WaterSense Label.
The EPA designed this program with the understanding that consumers might want to conserve water but would probably not do so at a sacrifice to comfort. Products that they endorse with their stamp of certification are guaranteed to reduce water use by at least 20% while maintaining the practical standards of traditional plumbing fixtures. What would be the point of having a water efficient toilet if you needed to flush it twice every time you used it, right?
Savings from these appliances will stack up too. Using less water with your faucets and shower not only saves on your utility bill but also means less water needs to be sent through your water heater, which will reduce the cost of your electricity bill. The EPA even has a handy savings calculator so that you can calculate your savings for 3 months or up to 10 years depending.
The Lyttle Companies were able to attend the Monday and Tuesday sessions of the 2011 VOWRA Conference at the Koger Center in Midlothian, VA.
Monday was the “education day” where sessions where held on trench safety, contour digging for drainfields, online reporting/RME systems, electrical panel training, contract law, and installer math. We benefited from each session. Some of our people have decades of experience under their belts so a lot of the sessions were a review. After the session, good discussions were held about the continued application of the topics presented. Our only complaint is that some of the presenters seemed to be inappropriately assigned to each topic. Whether this was due to a lack of vendor sponsors in a particular area or simply an organizational oversight, we hope to see an improvement at next year’s conference.
The second day was primarily concerned with regulatory and environmental issues. Presentations were given by representatives of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, Virginia Department of Health, and Environmental Protection Agency.
We were proud to have the conference in our backyard and enjoyed playing host to many different companies from around the Commonwealth and beyond. Next year, we hope to see even more people involved with this conference. All in all, Kudos to VOWRA for a job well done!
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.
