My brother has a proposal for an alternative energy vehicle, which he refers to as the “fart car.” The car would run on the gaseous emissions of the driver and passengers, and he likes to claim it's the solution to any impending crisis with the petroleum supply. After all, it's a renewable resource, and one supplied largely by the passengers within the vehicle. In an emergency, all you have to do is eat, then wait.
Apparently it is now time for this idea to come to fruition, though perhaps not entirely as he envisioned it. In the UK, you can take a ride on a bus powered entirely by human waste, or poop to put it in cruder terms. In order to underline this point, the side of the bus is covered with illustrations of people who are creating its fuel, so to speak. One of the illustrations is knitting at the same time. It's possibly not the most appetizing imagery they could have chosen.
Still, while people don't like to think of what happens after they flush their toilet and everything is spirited away to an unknown destination, the bus raises a valid point. Why not use all this waste? It's not being used for anything else, after all, and it's clear that you can use this to power things in your life. If it can reliably get a bus from point to point, why can't it heat our homes or power our various gadgets? We are essentially sitting on top of an endless source of renewable energy, it stands to reason we should use some of it.
Waste from people is also not the only place where such things can be sourced. Farms, for instance, could use the waste animals produce as another income source. There is already a market to use some as fertilizer, but I don't think any farmer would object to another income stream potentially opening up. Getting rid of the animal waste is necessary no matter where it actually winds up in the end, and anyone who has ever met a cow, for example, knows that it produces an ample supply of product to refine down into an energy source. If you're going to have to deal with all that waste anyway, and you will, finding a way to reduce the cost of removal, or even make some kind of profit from it, is going to be a compelling proposition.
Naturally there would likely be challenges to mass implementation of a waste-driven energy marketplace, most of which are related to chemistry and the expense of actually getting a usable product out of the waste produced. However, at the moment we have a supply product that we're just flushing away that has now been proven to be able to, at a bare minimum, power at least one bus. It stands to reason that we should be able to use this stuff we make anyway to actually do things, and ease the pressure on the finite oil supply.
It also puts me in the position of having to admit that my brother is something of a visionary. The fart car has problems, mostly in the difficulty of actually capturing gas, which has a tendency to disperse. But the core concept, using human waste to power a vehicle, has been proven to work. It's now even in a commonly used application, with a busy bus powered entirely by our sewage. If in the future we're all driving around powered by our bathroom, it will be the future he envisioned.
