Creative reuse can be applied to poop. A friend brought such marvels to my attention as I am the kind of person who is entertained by poop. There’s nothing more hilarious or amusing as poop…maybe because everyone poops. While poop is an unavoidable waste product, we do have creative ways to make it work for us.

A natural by-product of poop is methane gas. If you’ve ever smelled the funk driving south on I-95 past downtown Richmond, you know what methane gas smells like. You can see the flame from the top of the waste treatment facility along I-95 where it burns the methane gas in order to get rid of it. An alternative method of treating methane gas is using it as a source of energy. There are micro-organisms that can rapidly digest poop in an environment absent of oxygen (anaerobic digestion), naturally producing methane gas. When the methane gas is burned it can produce energy as a fuel or electricity.

Some other proven uses for human or animal waste:

•  Kennels, dairy farms, pet shop owners, etc can use a machine called a methane digester to convert animal waste into electricity
•  Paper made from elephant poop, as featured under STUFF’s Resources page
•  “Energy recovery facilities” reuse waste from the disposal process to create more energy (also cutting the mass of the waste in half) -- funded by stimulus funds maybe?
•  Use sterilized fibers extracted from cow poop to replace sawdust in the production of fiberboard
•  Fertilizer...uh duh!
•  More interesting applications...

-Elisabeth