Posted on 09/22/2010 7:32:18 AM PDT by IbJensen
Cambridge, Mass. (AP) - It stinks and it's a hazard to walkers everywhere, but it turns out dog poop has a bright side.
Dog poop is lighting a lantern at a Cambridge dog park as part of a months-long project that its creator, artist Matthew Mazzotta, hopes will get people thinking about not wasting waste.
The "Park Spark" poop converter is actually two steel, 500-gallon oil tanks painted a golden yellow, connected by diagonal black piping and attached to an old gaslight-style street lantern at the Pacific Street Park.
After the dogs do their business, signs on the tanks instruct owners to use biodegradable bags supplied on site to pick up the poop and deposit it into the left tank. People then turn a wheel to stir its insides, which contain waste and water. Microbes in the waste give off methane, an odorless gas that is fed through the tanks to the lamp and burned off. The park is small but has proven busy enough to ensure a steady supply of fuel.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
Perhaps combining the dog feces with human feces would increase the supply.
Washington would require an enormous supply of bull crap.
If this is working as advertised then it is a fine example of REAL recycling with free benefits.
Rarely do lib’tards create an idea that actually works, so cudos to him.
Well, they already have an abundant supply. So that will work out nicely.
Methane.........BOOM.......Fit hits the shan.
There is such a supply in DC that there would be no need for the Sun.
And all this time I thought it was powered by fumes from Ted Kennedy’s decaying corpse. Ooops! Same substance!
I think that without a water supply and a leach field, it has a very short lifespan.
Back in the late 1970’s I was very absorbed in learning all I could about alternate energy technologies to ascertain their practicality. A friend of mine had 1,000 acres of cow pasture with unlimited supplies of, ahem, natural resources, so I calculated how much manure it would take to generate the methane needed to power a generator and run everything in a very large house including air conditioning. After a long string of calculations, I realized it would require a digestion tank the size of a swimming pool and a ton of manure per day. My ultimate conclusion was that alternate energy sources are too diffuse to be practical for sustaining our standards of living. I gained new respect for the number of BTU’s packed into a gallon of petroleum.
Hey, why not?? It's been powering politicians for years! (OK... that was a gimme!)
Dairy farms do it - after milking, they flush the barn into a tank...
THAT powers one park lamp? Hmm.
Yes indeed, if one has a large amount of manure and a need to process it - you have a wonderful oppotunity.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2004-05-14/bay-area/17426549_1_methane-metering-straus-farms
ANd this article
http://www.nacaa.com/journal/index.php?jid=63
discusses the real costs and the impact of Grants and Subsidies. Well worth the short time to read.
Well, probably with a little natural gas mixed in. You know, like a hybrid car that still runs on gas?
;)
didn’t Hillary just give away a big chunk of our money in an attempt to get people in third-world countries to quit burning dog poo to power their stoves?
I’m thinking that those tanks will need to be cleaned out periodically. Is this what the President means by “green jobs”?
“Dairy farms do it - after milking, they flush the barn into a tank...”
Yes, I know. In that situation, the waste is already concentrated into a small area and easier to collect. However, how many households would go to that effort? I could not see myself pushing a wheelbarrow every day around many acres to gather up a ton of cow patties for the digester. As I said, that form of energy is too diffuse to be practical.
“THAT powers one park lamp? Hmm.”
Hmmm,,, Shades of “Thunderdome!”
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