Strange, but effective: The power of poop in Rwandan prisons
When you’ve got 120,000 prisoners of genocide, you’ve got two problems to deal with: A major demand for energy, and a major accumulation of human feces. So some ambitious and resourceful minds in the small African country decided to turn that poop into fuel. About 15 prisons now use a “digester” system that, with the help of special bacteria, turns the human feces of prisoners into biogas — methane — which is then used for cooking and lighting within the facilities. The by-product of this process is odourless fertilizer.
The Kigali Institute of Science, Technology and Management has already won an environmental award for the innovative biogas system, which like many things is a product of necessity.
It’s not so different really than the digester system built in Toronto to handle the green bin program. The Toronto system handles everything from rotting veggies and meat to the poop and paper in baby diapers. We stop at adult feces, however — got to draw the line somewhere, I guess.
I’m not sure if the city is doing anything yet with the resulting methane, but the idea — whether in Rwanda or Toronto — is a sound one.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca