In the video that I watched, it talked about how the new coal of the twenty-first century. They are deciding to use human waste as a new coal. They are taking a trailer/truck and collecting it all, then they hose all of it out and put it into a thing to contain all of it. After that, it goes through a carbonization process so that the water inside of it is extracted and it can no longer absored water. After that is done, it explains how the waste coal only takes a day to make while regular coal takes millions of years. The waste coal; however, is half as powerful. But, the waste coal is a lot more expensive so people will get 66% more energy.
I think the human waste coal is a great idea because it costs so much more money and take like so much less time. It helps the environment so much, while it also puts use to something we don't use anyway. We need to conserve our fossil fuels while we have them, and I think this is a great way and idea of starting to do so.
Questions:
1. Do you agree with this?
2. Can you think of any ways this could be used as?
3. How would you feel about using this power with a lot of things around you?
I agree, and think that it's great that we're finding other alternatives towards helping stop the use of coal. Though this topic seems a little "ewww", considering it's dealing in feces matters, in actuality it's a really good idea because not only are we eliminating using real coal, we're finding a renewable substitute in the process which can always be reliable. There are other many alternatives that are available as well, but many of them can also harm our environment and aren't always reliable. Since it seems that they're burning the human waste to create this energy, we're still harming our environment, but to a much lesser degree as I would imagine it less dirty than coal, the only thing is it probably smells awful in the process of being burned.
ReplyDeleteThis article reminded me about what Ms. Deluca said in class about the dog park in Chicago, and how people encourage you to leave your dog feces there, or even pay you for it just so they can use it to make methane gas! Pretty gross, but a good way to get rid of an unwanted material as it's helping use alternative sources to coal/natural gas/etc, again.
3. The way I feel about using this power is it can be a great tool to helping with our problem with fossil fuels already, however, any kinds of plants that would specialize in this fuel reviver I would not want to live by, as the smell would be terrible! Likewise, townships would probably want any kind of energy generator such as that to be placed far away as possible probably, so as to not upset town residents. Who knows though.
This sounded like a really good idea at first. Yet you said that the waste coal is more expensive yet you will get 66% more energy. I am going to assume u mean that it is cheaper and that you get more waste coal for the same amount of money for coal. It seems that using this way for coal will put less of a strain on actual coal and we could use it more efficiently. It appears to have the same environmental effect as coal so there is really no improvement there. This also almost seems to be a renewable energy source because we can make it in one day. This waste coal would seem to be an improvement on our natural resources and be great to use.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of how we talked about using biomass for energy. We seem to always be thinking of new ways to make new energy by using biomass. They probably have many different ways we can use different biomasses to create energy for us, just like we talked about in class. It aso reminds me of the paper we did on different biomasses and how we use human waste to create energy.
1. I completely agree with this and think that we should have more ways like this. Except that maybe we could burn different things or try not get as much CO2 emissions from these products. All in all though I completely agree with this, we should just look into ways of releasing less CO2 emissions.
Most tax-payers would be discouraged that they're taxes have been used to transform their waste. Hopefully, though, they'd see how it positively altered the cost and category of coal (decreasing prices and non renewable to renewable). It sounds like a great idea, use what we dispose of to get energy out of it.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of the energy producing oranges Emily wrote about. Both great ideas have positive effects, but also have a down-side. To charge something small there need to be lots of oranges; and the waste coal still adds to the greenhouse effect and is very expensive. In contrast, both would make coal a renewable resource.
The link below talks of how other types of waste can be used as fuel. For example, waste from cars, power plants, and thrown-out laptops can possibly be used as heat to make electricity.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/08/100823-energy-electric-power-from-heat/
This is definatly interresting considering humans are coming up with such innovative ways of making energy. it is concerning that it could smell really bad over time and that would probably decrease the value of the land around it. even so, i think it is a good idea because it woudl produce a very cheap and definatly renewable source of energy. I hope that something like this can be succesfully organized so that we actually have a chance to use it in our homes.
ReplyDeletethis is like the flinstones in which they run thier cars off of their own personal energy, even though it is not their waste it is still the same type of idea. they are useing what they have to get somewhere when we are using what we produce to get light, heat, electricity, ect. even though that was in the stone age, it is what we may have to resort to now that we are running out of fossil fuels.
3. i would be a little weired out knowing that my own waste is making my lightbulb turn on, or making heat come out of my vent, but i guess it would be okay because i know that it was not going to be the last of it, and that this would continue for tons of years. also that the price of this would defianatly NOT be rising considering that if there are humans, they will most definatly make waste.