Turning dog waste into Enegry

 Park Spark in action

It might not be a good idea to read this week’s gardening article if you are eating your mid morning chocolate biscuit and sipping on a cuppa. The reason for this is that I am touching on the subject of dog poo. This particular issue comes about quite regularly, especially when we don’t have any heavy rain for a long period to wash the stuff away from the paths. 

Father Hegarty’s Rock

There was a bit of a campaign about the shore path near Father Hegarty’s Rock where locals were venting their displeasure at having to keep a constant eye on the ground and dart from one side of the path to another to avoid big lumps of the stuff. Some folk suggested covert cameras and naming and shaming the offenders who allow their dogs to foul the paths without clearing up after their pets.  This would mean either CCTV being installed or a member of the camera club hiding in the undergrowth for hours or even days on end until they catch one of the animals in the act. They would then have to run pretty fast to get away with the photographic evidence and present it to the council.  I can’t see either of them working or being implemented so it will most likely have to be some form of ‘educational programme’ to get dog owners who don’t see this as a problem to repent the error of their ways.  I don’t really see that working either.  There could be a solution though and as daft as it may seem the poo could be used to generate electricity to light up the path by means of street lamps.

Turning Dog Waste into Renewable Energy

Most of us dog owners will pick up the mess with either a specially designed poopa scoopa but more likely you will be like me and use a plastic carrier bag.  This has then either got to be carried to the nearest dog bin, which isn’t always handy, or carried around until you get home. It sounds yukkie but it’s something we get used to. Nothing useful happens to the poo though when it’s put in the bin.

What we could use is an idea from artist Matthew Mazzotta who suggested introducing small digesters into public parks to collect dog waste and transform it into methane, which in turn could produce electricity. The idea called Park Spark is simple, put the poo in the digester, turn a handle to mix it with water which releases the microbes gasses and provide the nearest lamppost with fuel, and earns the local area carbon credits.

It needn’t end there either, cow manure in The Netherlands, has been used to heat water to boil tea at a site of communal tea drinking. There was a time when the Nightsoil men would come to your house and collect the solid and liquid waste; in cities they would take this to local farms for spreading, maybe that would be an idea to reinstate that service. I wouldn’t be in the queue for the job though. That’s me finished about poo so you can get back to the biscuits now.