Human Waste Powers India

A firm out of India is looking to profit from human waste. Sintex Industries, a plastics and textiles manufacturer in Gujarat, India has started up its new biogas digester which turns human excrement, cow dung, or kitchen garbage into fuel that can be used for cooking or generating electricity.

The company’s digester uses bacteria to break down waste into sludge and during the process the bacteria emits gases, mostly methane. But instead of being vented into the air, the gasses are piped into a storage canister. Sintex’s digester once primed with cow dung can provide enough bacteria generated gasses to supply a four-person family into enough gas to cook all its meals and provide sludge for fertilizer.

According to Sintex a model this size costs about $425 but will pay for itself in energy savings in less than two years. That’s still a high price for most Indians, even though the government recently agreed to subsidize about a third of the cost for these family-sized units. "We want to create a new industry for portable sanitation in India that’s not available now," says S.B. Dangayach, Sintex’s Managing Director.

Government officials plan to end open defecation by 2012 (hundreds of millions of Indians use railroad tracks or other outdoor locales instead of toilets) and say biogas plants are part of the solution. A.R. Shukla, a scientific advisor in the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, says India could support 12 million such plants, but only 3.9 million digesters big enough to accommodate entire villages, have been installed to date. And last year the government fell far short of its target for new installations.