Poop Power: Dog-Fueled Park Lamps

5 by Becky Striepe on September 23, 2010

walking the dog

We talked not too long ago about generating energy with bodily fluids, and more weird sources of renewable energy seem to be popping up every day. Now, a park in Cambridge, Massachusetts is trying out lamp posts powered with dog poop.

If common courtesy isn't enough to get dog owners to pick up after their pets, maybe this MIT-funded project will do the trick!

park spark project

The Park Spark Project uses an underground Methane Digester to turn doggie waste into usable energy. Dog owners pick up their pups' waste using special bags that they toss right into the digester. Once you toss the bag inside, you give the machine a quick stir, and it burns the methane to produce fuel.

Not only does the project mean free, clean energy for parks, it means keeping all of those plastic bags of dog waste out of the landfill. Like any kind of organic matter, dog poo produces methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than CO2, when it breaks down in a landfill. The whole basis of this project is to harness that methane to power lights and other park amenities.

Right now, they're deploying the project in Cambridge, but they hope to expand it to parks in other cities.

[h/t: Wired]

Image Credits:
Walking the Dog. Creative Commons photo by jurvetson
Graphic via Park Spark Project

http://solar.calfinder.com/blog Taylen

perfect idea for San Francisco…i’d like to take a minute, just sit right there. i’ll tell you how:
1) people in SF love their pets/animals/and animal rights as, basically, citizens of sf
2) said owners think that their particular dog’s poop doesn’t smell or is actually a pleasant thing to step in on your morning walk to work, as evidenced by every block having multiple piles
3) people of sf are actually quite green…either because they truly are or because it’s trendy and we all seem to think we’re the trendsetters…

so how this all works is that when their little pooping machine gets going a spark will go off in the owner’s head saying, ‘hey i can be green about this and fuel the bulb’ and actually pick it up off the sidewalk and drop it in the digester…thus solving multiple problems at once!
http://ecopolitology.org Timothy B. Hurst

Great idea actually. I just heard a piece on NPR about how parking tickets in the City of Cambridge now have yoga poses on the backs of them. Cambridge really is a bit different, especially for the East Coast.
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http://www.yellowbluedesigns.com Jessica Janes

This is amazing. All of the plastic bags are annoying, but the content is no box of chocolates either. What a great way to make this smelly stuff, useful. Very cool. Can’t wait to see them everywhere.
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Props for the quality piece about this.