Biogas digester
Bob Morris @ Mar 5th 2008 00:20 - Category: Renewable energy
Sintex Industries in India has introduced a biogas digester that will use animal dung, human excrement, and kitchen scraps to produce enough methane to provide a family of four to cook all their meals, as well as sludge for fertilizer.
The future can be glimpsed on a dusty, rutted road in a poor South Delhi neighborhood. Here 1,000 people use an immaculately clean public toilet constructed by a nonprofit foundation, the Sulabh Sanitation Movement. The biogas digester attached to toilets provides cooking gas for a 600-student school and vocational-training program.
This not only provides free energy, it eliminates the obvious sanitation problems caused by the common practice of open defecation in India.
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DJ on 05 Mar 2008 at 11:35 am #
Interesting to note that widespread use of such an obvious improvemment would cause hundreds of thousands to starve, as those whose job (or caste) it is to make dung cakes for fuel would be thrown out of business.
Bob Morris on 05 Mar 2008 at 1:02 pm #
In The World is Flat, Friedman talks about Wal-Mart. Terrible health benefits for employees which costs both the employees and municipalities considerable money. And they grind their suppliers unmercifully.
But according to some studies, they have saved their mostly lower-income customers hundreds of billions because of their low prices.
Technology and flattening worlds have strange, sometimes seemingly contrary effects.