Turn household wastes (human wastes and food scraps) into clean burning biogas with $300-$400? (waiting for current price list) Biotech biogas plants, or make one yourself. Biotech also sells waste to electricity plants. Payback period is only 2-3 years. They now mass produce their biogas plants out of PVC and aim to sell one to every household in India as a standard commodity.
“Getting rid of waste, both food and human, is essential to hygiene. But waste is also a cost-effective and sustainable source of fuel. The evidence? Well, since 2004 Biotech India has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Kerala, Southern India and saved several thousand tonnes per year of CO2 simply by getting rid of waste. [Way more now since these numbers are five years old and the company is booming and they’ve expanded to other states.]
Their success is all down to their biogas digester. Designed to be easily installed, it comes in different sizes to process not only home waste but also market and municipal waste. Digestion produces biogas which in turn reduces reliance on more expensive and harder to access LPG.”
This second video describes a related project that makes fertilizer.
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great article
Biogas plants are awesome, but you won’t be able to produce much from kitchen scraps and human waste. You’ll need several large animals to make it feasible for cooking.
That would be ideal. According to the video interviews of numerous customers, they said they were getting enough gas to cook all their meals every day. Some get extra scraps from the market. Some may collect their neighbors compost that would normally be discarded. So this raises the question how will this scale? Early adopters who get extra food scraps seem to do fine. Those in agricultural areas can get more easily get compost. But there’s a limit to what’s available in cities. This doesn’t sound practical on a wide scale for everyone. (Although 20,000 have been sold in Kerala and they keep selling like crazy.)
Approximately 2 million (rough estimate) biogas reactors have been installed around the world. They obviously work quite well. Biotech India has taken the technology to the next level by mass producing standardized PVC units. I expect sales to take off like crazy. Countless NGOs and government entities warn of serious environmental problems if the world doesn’t change course. How long before these groups jump on board and subsidize proven technologies such as these biogas plants?
Here’s the same basic question worded differently: Can you buy a standardized biogas plant for a few hundred dollars from local suppliers? Why not? This is not new technology.