Why don’t we all use composting toilets to generate methane gas to fuel our homes?
Filed in Conserving energy on Feb.16, 2009
BD asked:
Since methane gas is the natural byproduct of human waste and the decomposition of organic matter why don’t we use our toilets, garbage disposals and compost piles to cook with and heat our water and homes?
Why doesn’t all of our organic waste, human, food and yard, get deposited in a central bin in our homes, where it can decompose, while the combustible methane gas can be contained in a sealed chamber and channelled to use for heating, hot water, cooking, drying and refrigeration? I would guess that a properly maintained compost bin could generate fuel from an abundance of leaves, grass clippings, even newspaper with the proper design.
Since methane gas is the natural byproduct of human waste and the decomposition of organic matter why don’t we use our toilets, garbage disposals and compost piles to cook with and heat our water and homes?
Why doesn’t all of our organic waste, human, food and yard, get deposited in a central bin in our homes, where it can decompose, while the combustible methane gas can be contained in a sealed chamber and channelled to use for heating, hot water, cooking, drying and refrigeration? I would guess that a properly maintained compost bin could generate fuel from an abundance of leaves, grass clippings, even newspaper with the proper design.
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February 17th, 2009 at 7:22 am
I wouldn’t want a composting toilet in my house, as the smell wouldn’t be all that great. If it was in the house, it could aid the spread of disease too.
It would have to be cleaned out on a basis of sorts, would you be willing to do that for everyone in the world?
Ok, so it could be collected into large vats and be done on a large scale, but you probably wouldn’t get a large enough amount of the methane for it to be worth it.
Why don’t we put cows in a giant greenhouse and collect all of their methane?
If you think, you would probably release about 1dm^3 of methane a day? (only a stab in the dark) so that would be a very small amount of methane altogether. Would probably add up to about 1 minute of a computer being turned on.
(I’m making up the figures, but you can see where i’m coming from)
March 18th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
i am with a group going to africa an we are investigateing naturan resorce methods to teach them this is a potential idea for us, along with the use of survival water
April 22nd, 2010 at 7:56 am
I remember seeing a Mexican shanty town that has a “manure” pit. It was covered & rubber hoses lead from it to a general cooking area. there were two make shift stoves & they were using the gas from the little communities human waste. The rubber hoses lead to the little stoves & old stove parts with metal tubing were near the heat as the rubber would have melted.
Every “household” emptied buckets into the same pit through a trap door near the top.
Yes the first response was making up figures, bad ones based on nothing they knew anything about & should have just stuck to a topic they were knowledgeable in instead of blathering negativities about something they knew NOTHING about.
Third world countries do this on a regular basis as a means of survival.