Sustainable Tarpon Springs - Poo Power!

Sometimes conventional wisdom needs to be turned on its head.  For example, attending a weekend seminar at the Greater Earthship Community completely turned my perceptions about traditional architecture inside out.  After I had been shown ‘out-of-the-box’ Earthships, conventional homes seemed unnecessarily dependent upon stuff they were ‘plugged in to’ for power, water, and to take away waste.

As the saying goes, ‘Necessity is the Mother of Invention’ - and honestly, we should recognize the time for reinvention is NOW!  To many folks, it doesn’t seem that we’ve reached the tipping point of absolute necessity yet, but it is critical to acknowledge old power sources are destined to run dry.  Oil, gas, and coal, are finite, and coupled with our growing population, are disappearing exponentially.

Energy sources such as solar power and wind are called ‘renewable’ because they are tapping into unlimited sources.  Until the sun expires, which is not likely around the corner, we have free energy shining down on us.  And throughout the world, where the wind blows consistently, more and more localized wind farms are being established.  Tides and geothermal energy are also being utilized for power production.

Solutions will need to be multi-faceted and very localized as the demands for power are greatly increasing.  Renewable solutions require localization due to inherent voltage drop over long distances, but the good news is that with a little design-ingenuity, everything we need is right here, right now.

For example, back in the 1980’s, after the first massive energy crisis in California, another innovative source of renewable energy came online .  It solved two problems simultaneously, reducing the huge carbon footprint of dairy farms by capturing the methane, while producing energy to run the dairy when energy shortages had driven up power prices.  

Manure ‘waste-to-energy’ digester systems became a two-fold solution to methane pollution issues and energy shortages.  This was dubbed ReMooable Energy, and poo-power not only ran the dairies, but excess was contributed back to the grid!  For a modest investment, methane digesters became a solution from California to Vermont, and here’s a great story about it in Michigan:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDMv8IkuEQw  

Another invention from the 1970’s was composting toilets which gained instant popularity in off-grid homes.  Now scientists at Nanyang Technological University have taken the concept even further by pioneering the ‘No-Mix Vacuum Toilet’ similar to the type on commercial aircraft.  It has two chambers to separate the liquid and solid wastes, dramatically minimizing water waste in flushing.  

The No-Mix Vacuum Toilet diverts the liquid waste to a processing facility where components are broken down into nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium as fertilizer.  Solid waste is sent to a bioreactor where it is digested to release bio-gas, containing methane, and is converted to electricity used to fuel power plants or fuel cells.  This results in a complete recovery of resources.

The ultimate aim of the new toilet system is to not only save water, but completely recover potential resources in so-called ‘waste’.  This type of toilet will likely be the norm in all LEED certified homes someday, and is a perfect solution for resource-starved and over-populated Singapore. 

Beyond ‘energy-producing’ toilets, it seems a strong possibility that green neighborhoods will eventually be designed around centralized waste plants that don’t just ‘treat’ sewage, but truly utilized it in high-tech methane digesters as another renewable source of power, while solids become composted and usable as well.  

Sustainable Tarpon Springs, like all cities and communities throughout the world, will eventually seek every avenue of localized power production.  To think ahead and be prepared will certainly reduce the stress of an urgent transition.  This is already happening in many places where our style of infrastructure has never existed and people are willing to experiment. 

Thus far, most of the methane digesters in this country have been used exclusively for animal waste, but all waste (including our own) has potential as a power source.  Someday we all could be singing the praises of poo-power, and believe it or not, the planet will be a much cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable place!