Lyttle Companies

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.

Do you know what “grey water” is? Grey water is all household wastewater that hasn’t been used in toilets. 50% -80% of any households water usage will end up as grey water. What happens next is really disappointing though. All of this reusable grey water is mixed with unusable “black water” or sewage water and sent down the sewer to the local wastewater treatment plant before it’s dumped into the nearest river or estuary as effluent.

If we were to recycle this grey water we could reduce our water consumption by 50% or more. The good news is that it is easy to capture and reuse grey water on site. Once captured this water can be distributed to toilets or outside for irrigation. Depending on the type of system you want, and what you intend to use it for, prices can range from a hundred dollars or so for a simple irrigation setup to thousands of dollars for advanced multi-stage filtration systems.

Getting to the point where it’s the norm for individual households to be recycling grey water will take some time; but there are already large scale commercial grey water recycling systems in place right in your own back yard. Recently Chesterfield County began supplying a nearby dominion power plant with 2 million gallons of wastewater per day for use in a process that helps to reduce air pollution. Large-scale reuse systems like this are popping up all over the country and will become commonplace in the near future.