Animal dung can produce electricity & power your car
"Many zoos compost, taking thousands of tons of manure produced by herbivores like giraffes and rhinos and converting them into nutrient-rich fertilizer that they can sell, give away, or use to enrich their own grounds. But the Toronto Zoo is taking their shitshow a step further: They plan to build the first zoo biogas plant in North America.
The plant would take in 3,000 tons of poop (most of it produced by elephants, unsurprisingly) as well as 14,000 tons of inedible waste scraps from Canada’s largest grocery store. All this fodder should produce enough energy to run the entire zoo (the biggest in Canada!), divert a huge amount of waste from landfills, and even sell electricity to Ontario’s grid. Zooshare, the company fronting the project, estimates that the plant’s greenhouse gas reduction will be the equivalent of removing 2,100 cars from the road each year.
...Neighbors of pig farmers everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief. In 2012, scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign converted pig manure into crude oil, using the same geologic process that creates oil from the bones of dead dinosaurs. But instead of applying heat and pressure over about 65 million years, these scientists did it in their lab’s metal reactor in less than an hour.
Theoretically, this pig oil could be used as a replacement for current uses of crude, including fueling small electric or heating plants or even cars. But lead scientist Yuanhui Zhang is quick to note that his technology isn’t likely to catch on, since big oil refineries aren’t set up to process the poop. And all things considered, crude oil is still terrible for the environment. But at least the poop-derived variety isn’t buried deep within the earth and extracted at extreme environmental cost."
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2014-5-september-october/green-life/how-solid-waste-doing-you-solid?src=1link&utm_source=greenlife&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter