So why not heat your home or power your car with something that all living things produce in abundance? The concept of recycling poop isn't exactly new, but some pioneers in Japan and San Francisco are trying to utilize dung to power cars and homes, respectively.
The city of San Francisco is battling a waste disposal problem. The Guardian UK reports that "4% of the city's residential waste -- some 6,500 tons a year -- is made up of animal byproducts, a scientific term for dog shit. The dog shit rivals disposable nappies for the space it takes up on landfill sites." The city has hired a company called Sunset Scavenger to do the dirty work. They will be scooping the poop in public places, storing and fermenting it, and then selling it back to the city's inhabitants in the form of methane gas [1]. The plan is that the methane will power their appliances. What's next -- will human poop soon be going into a composter to fire up the gas stove or water heater? In twenty years will I be saying to Mr. Blaster, "Honey, eat extra beans today so I can have a hot bath?" If that's the case, I picked the right husband!
Across the Pacific, the ever-resourceful Japanese are making gasoline out of cow dung [2]. Sakae Shibusawa, an agriculture engineering professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, said his team has successfully extracted .042 ounces of gasoline from every 3.5 ounces of cow dung by applying high pressure and heat. He also figures that "about 551,155 tons of cattle dung are produced each year in Japan." Doing the math,* that could produce about 361,695 gallons of gasoline each year. If the typical Japanese car gets 30 miles per gallon, the Japanese could drive over ten million miles a year on cowpies. Shibusawa hopes to make this crappy technology commercially available within five years. Which means that gas mileage, while simultaneously taking on a much more literal meaning, may someday be measured in MPCP (Miles Per Cow Patty.)
But if that doesn't work out, good news: Japanese scientists have also found a way to extract vanillin -- an aromatic ingredient often used to make vanilla-scented products -- from bovine stinkbombs [3]. Wrap your head around this: that vanilla air freshener you buy to mask the stench of the catbox, or poopy diapers, or your husband's toxic dookie bombs, could actually be made from cow dung itself.
*Editor's note: AB2K calculated it's 361,695 gallons of gas. I arrived at 1,653,465 gallons. Can somebody who's good at this sort of thing check the math?