I am always amused by how many adults still seem to retain a six-year-old’s fascination with bathroom humor. Anything that relates to the subject of our own plumbing may well produce giggles and eye-rolling in the best of circles. But waste products are a fact of life.
And it may be one we would rather not think about. Except that we have to. To borrow a euphemism, our nation produces billions of gallons of what we’ll call “wastewater” every day.
Many of us think it is magically transported to some immaculate facility where it is speedily transformed back into clean drinking water. But that isn’t quite true. More often than you think, the treatment plants get backed up, sometimes just as a result of a thunderstorm.
That means they have to release raw sewage somewhere, and sometimes, somewhere is the Great Lakes. That happens way too often. According to the Sierra Legal Defense Fund, twenty of this region’s large cities dump enough untreated raw sewage into the Great Lakes to fill 3,650 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
All of a sudden, my annual summer swim in Charlevoix looks a lot less tempting.
Thirty years ago, I did a story on a wastewater plant in Tiffin, Ohio that may have been the first in the country to use the methane to generate power for itself. In the Seattle suburb of Renton, Washington, a huge treatment plant uses sewage methane to supply all its energy needs. But now there's an even better idea to move beyond using methane and use all the sewage to power not only the plants themselves, but thousands of homes. The key to doing that is a machine called a “digester” which sounds, I know, like something out of a low-budget horror flick.
But evidently, a digester can take all that stuff we don’t like to think about, and convert it to both energy, and benign compost.
In the short run, the electricity generated by that method would probably cost a little more than electricity generated by conventional means. But Greg Mulder, a power specialist in Grand Rapids, thinks that in the long run, it would save both money and energy.
He thinks that if we buy a fleet of digesters and convert all of Michigan‘s sewage into electricity, they could produce enough to power more than 25,000 households every year.
That‘s not a total answer.
But it would put a dent in the more than $18 billion Michigan spends every year to import energy from out-of-state sources. Plus, it would presumably stop all those Olympic swimming pools of waste from being dumped into the Great Lakes. And that alone ought to be worth whatever the price of whole lot of digesters might be.
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