Posted on 01/08/2015 9:29:26 AM PST by Brad from Tennessee
Bill Gates and friends have developed a simple system to convert human feces into electricity, fresh water and pathogen-free ash – and no stink!
In a quest to find a way to end the tragic death of more than 700,000 children annually from drinking bad water, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has sponsored a variety of waste treatment programs in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Janicki Bioenergy develops and manufactures a variety of sizes of this system. It uses the combustible biomass (roughly 20% of the feces) to heat mass quantities to ~2000 degrees Fahrenheit. The super-heated steam from the water content (80% of the waste material) then drives a generator to create electricity to power the unit with enough left-over to share in the community. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
Look up “Changing World Technologies”.
The basic science is sound - you use high heat and pressure to take some form of bio waste and turn it into pure water, a synthetic petroleum, and everything else can be centrifuged out as minerals or mineral oxides.
The problem is in the implementation - CWT failed because they were unable to make their plant scale up to a useful production level without constant complaints from nearby businesses and residences of foul odors being emanated from the plant.
I saw a pic of the machine in the news story I saw on TV. It’s about the size of a small 2-story house with a couple small out-buildings.
One of the things they were wanting with this is the ability to do what it does without being an economic burden. It looks, so far, like they may have succeeded.
I’ll wait for Service Pak 2.
Given California has had major water problems, maybe they ought to start shipping them there.
Article doesn’t mention a peep about how much maintenance it requires. In a place like Africa, that would mean is runs splendidly until it breaks down once, then it is a curious bit of sculpture.
Maybe he can do that with Windows Millennium and Vista.
The city doing this is Milwaukee, and they sell Milorganite for $25 a 25# bag.
Burning sewage sludge is a bad idea. It has a high concentration of metals which make the ash hazardous waste.
Doing much of anything else with waste is kind of stupid.
That is, after all, the natural cycle. Animals, directly or indirectly, feed on plants. Then the animal waste goes to fertilize the plants.
Instead of putting waste back onto the land, where it is beneficial, we have historically dumped it in rivers, where it is most definitely detrimental.
There are, however, difficult problems with using city sewage for fertilizer, mostly having to do with presence of chemicals and heavy metals. Handling the pathogen load and odor we normally think of as the problem is trivial by comparison.
I am not so sure about the smell. Every time the golf course is fertilized, I can smell it.
Color me skeptical.
To burn the solids you must first separate it from the liquids and dry it thoroughly. Evaporating or vaporizing water takes a LOT of energy.
I will be very surprised if there’s enough fuel value here to even run the machine, much less produce “excess” electricity.
Willing to be convinced, but I’d like to see the input/output specs.
I have noticed the smell too as I use it in my gardens around my pool and on my lawn. It also attracts flies for about a week.
So putting those metals on your garden to grow food is somehow a good idea?
My understanding is that most, at least, of the metal content is not due to human feces, but to "other" stuff that gets dumped down the drain.
Dewetting sewage sludge to 2% moisture for it to be used in combustion fuel applications requires 300 times (X). The use of heat in dewetting and drying is not linear.
The metals in sludge are dispersed over a huge area when used as fertilizer. As a byproduct of combustion they become super concentrated as ash. The metals are mostly iron oxide and in older cities, lead from the sewer hook-up pipes used prior to 1970.
So what multiple or percentage of (X) do you get back when you burn the sludge? That is of course the relevant question.
Who has obviously never been introduced to the EPA regulations we all live under. Who has also never even seen Proposition #65.
Well, I hope it works, but Bill Gates should drink the first glass of water to set an example.
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just drill a well?
Noxious enough to get the whole operation shut down.
Just putting it out there as something to consider with any of these technologies - you have to consider the environmental (as it really means, not it’s misuse for ecological) issues of things like sound, odor, eyesores, etc., as well as the raw technology and its outputs.
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