The one thing for sure is that some reader somewhere is going to give me heck for talking about fecal matter instead of politics. It seems that everyone is expert when it comes to human waste. It was delightful to read though the other day the Ontario’s environmental commissioner wants the politicians to get off their rears and take advantage of the energy producing capabilities of our excrement.
You probably did not know that your daily dump has latent energy. Neither do our politicians. Back a half dozen years, an environmentalist friend and I took the case to our city council here in Barrie. The city was in the process at the time of greatly expanding its waste water plant and we thought it would be smart for the city to use some of the energy it was wasting. We scoped out the potential and we figured that the wasted energy from the expanded plant, along with back-up natural gas, could provide heating and air conditioning to more than a dozen high-rise condominiums in the area.
We were talking of an inexpensive way to turn waste into a multi-million dollar return to the city. If you wonder if it works, you only have to study the Markham District Energy Inc. They are using networked natural gas facilities there to heat and cool a rapidly growing city.
But not Barrie’s politicians. They looked at us as if we had four heads instead of just two. And when I suggested that they should offer apartment building developers along their sewage trunk lines incentives to include kitchen garburators, they thought I was the crazy one. It would be the cheapest way to capture kitchen waste from apartment building and keep it out of landfills. It would also provide a great deal more methane gas.
That is why it is good to see that Dianne Saxe, Ontario’s environmental commissioner is trying to get more politicians in this province aware of the power of poop. The era of waste and dumping everything in landfills is past. We need innovation and we need progressive politicians.
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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry
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