Paid To Poop: How Feces Is Creating “Clean” Energy
A university in South Korea has designed an eco-friendly toilet that turns waste into energy and cryptocurrency, which university students can use to buy food and coffee on campus.
The BeeVi toilet was created by urban and environmental engineering professor Cho Jae-weon, who teaches at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST).
“If we think out of the box, feces has precious value to make energy and manure. I have put this value into ecological circulation,” Cho said, as carried by Reuters.
The innovative toilet has a vacuum pump that sends the waste to a tank underground. The toilet thus reduces water usage and has been called a “super water-saving vacuum toilet.”
In the tank in a lab, microorganisms turn the waste into methane. The gas then powers a hot-water boiler, a gas stove, and a solid oxide fuel cell, providing energy for the building.
The average human waste per day can be converted into 50 liters of methane gas, which could generate enough power to drive a car for nearly a mile, or to generate 0.5 kilowatts (kWh) of electricity, the South Korean professor says.
The eco-friendly toilet can be used by university students to help mine a cryptocurrency Cho has invented, Ggool. The crypto can be used as a payment for food, fruit, coffee, or books at the campus, according to the university.
Every student using the toilet earns 10 Ggool, Korean for honey, a day.
“I had only ever thought that faeces are dirty, but now it is a treasure of great value to me,” postgraduate student Heo Hui-jin told Reuters. “I even talk about faeces during mealtimes to think about buying any book I want.”
Cryptocurrency mining has recently attracted a lot of attention because of the large amount of energy it sucks. Elon Musk, who had said earlier this year that people could buy Teslas with Bitcoin, backtracked on this promise a few weeks later, saying that crypto mining is still largely powered by fossil fuel-derived energy. Most recently, Musk said last month that Tesla may start accepting cryptocurrency again if crypto mining becomes green.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
At South Korea‘s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, students can now defecate to earn cryptocurrency and help power a building.
UNIST urban and environmental engineering professor Cho Jae-weon designed an eco-friendly toilet that harnesses human feces to produce biogas and manure. Dubbed the BeeVi Toilet (a portmanteau of the words bee and vision), the innovative toilet utilizes a vacuum pump rather than water and is connected to an underground tank where microorganisms break down waste.
The microorganisms create methane that can be used as a sustainable source of energy in a variety of ways. An average person defecates 500g a day which roughly converts into 50 liters of methane gas or 0.5kWh of electricity which is enough to drive a car 1.2km (0.75 miles).
“If we think out of the box, feces has precious value to make energy and manure. I have put this value into ecological circulation,” said Cho Jae-weon.
Additionally, students that use the BeeVi Toilet can early 10 Ggool (honey in Korean) a day, a cryptocurrency dispensed by the eco-friendly toilet that can be used on campus to purchase products.
No comments:
Post a Comment