A researcher at a university in South Korea has created a toilet that turns human feces into energy. As a bonus incentive (rewards and gamification always work) it provides a small amount of digital currency to exchange for a coffee or cup of noodles on campus.
How does the "generator toilet" that makes human feces energy
A nice slime process, no doubt about it. First, the toilet pumps the feces into an underground tank (using much less water than a traditional toilet). And oh well. A group of special microorganisms then breaks down the stool and turns it into methane, a usable source of energy.
What about: a nice new method to transform wastewater into energy, n'est pas?
Manure Weapon (I've been dreaming of making this joke for years)
“If we think outside the box, feces have a valuable value for producing energy,” he told the Reuters the inventor Cho Jae-weon, professor of urban and environmental engineering at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST). “I put this value in ecological circulation.” Is good.
According to Cho, the toilet could process about half a kilo of human feces, the average amount of excrement produced in a day. in 50 liters of methane gas. In simple terms, that means this toilet can generate half a kilowatt hour of electricity, enough to drive an electric car more than a kilometer (or power other devices, of course).
And it also gives you pennies.
And since we are in the era where nothing is safe from cryptocurrencies, Cho invented another one. A virtual currency that he called Ggool (it means “honey” in Korean, but I don't think Brin and Page would take it well). Each use of this special bathroom earns you 10 Ggool per day, which can be used to buy things on the university campus.
“I always thought feces were dirty,” says Heo Hui-Jin, a postgraduate student who is testing the use of Ggools. Yeah, I thought they were dirty too. You look at someone who goes to think.
“But now they are a treasure of great value to me,” says the student. “I even talk about feces during meals just to convince friends to do it in my bathroom so I can buy all the eBooks I want.”