Smells Like Green Spirit

This is just insane!

I first stumbled upon this a while ago at The Healthy Green Blog, but apparently a few years ago the winner of the British Ashten Award (which honors sustainable energy products) was an overpopulated Rwandan prison which had begun converting prisoner waste into combustable biogas for cooking and fertilizer! That’s so wonderful! And gross! And amazing! And creepy…

Sewage disposal had been a major health hazard for the prison and the surrounding area, and while not a new development, Rwanda was the first to impliment it on such a grand scale with such grand success.

The organization which is responsible for this amazing and disgusting development is KIST, or the Kigali Institute of Science, Technology and Management, established in 1997 to “transfer technical innovations, managerial, and entrepreneurship skills into community applications”. For more information, visit the KIST website.

What the Heck is Biogas??

The production of biogas involves putting organic material into an air-tight tank and letting bacteria break it down, where by it releases gas. (Does this mean we could eat lots of beans and produce our own sustainable biogas? That I do not know.) The biogas can then be used as fuel, with its remants usable for organic composting.

To greatly simplify the process, the human waste is flushed into things called air-tight “digesters” where the gas-making process takes place. It is then piped into kitchens for cooking, and this process somehow also deals with the smell and unsanitary-ness of the waste.

For more information:
Ashten Award
Kigali Institute of Science and Technology

By the way, I read an amazing book about the Rwandan genocide by journalist Philip Gourevitch entitled We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda that I’d highly recommend anyone read who wants an indepth, moving and fascinating history of those dark days in Rwanda. The last story in the book made me bawl. It’s a sad but important history we should all know more about.

Share This

A few years ago, a chilling documentary called “Chernobyl Heart” aired on HBO about a children’s mental asylum in Vesnova located near the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. A reported 40% upsurge in birth defects linked with the nuclear catastrophe coupled with the area’s poverty filled the children’s home with twisted creatures rarely seen in more well-off western countries. The girl whose brain grew entirely separately from her head, the girl with “water on the brain” that made her head swell to the size of a huge upside down pear, the young one whose body was twisted painfully into a backwards horseshoe shape by a bent spine…these were just some of the tear jerking images of what 100-200 years ago would likely have been marketed in circuses and sideshows as circus freaks.

And yet, another strange thing emerged from the nuclear disaster. As the area with an 18 mile radius has been completely abandoned by people, the incredible biodiversity that has erupted has stunned scientists. Free from the interferences of people terrified of the nuclear core that will be burning for thousands years from now, the flora and fauna of Pripyat is flourishing at a startling rate.

Over 100 animals listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List of threatened species have been found in the area. While genetic mutations and deformities abound in young creatures, they are rarer in adults, implying that the mutations are weeded out as the fittest survive and the deformed die young. Trees have been found to grow twisted and confused, almost as if they “don’t know which end is up,” says Discover Magazine.

Will nuclear fall out in the future lead to less people and more animals on earth? Time will only tell. Surely for the answers, let us ask the cockroaches and the beetles who have been laughing at our foolish ways since the beginning.

For more information:

Chernobyl Children’s Project International
They have a wealth of links on the left hand of their home page with Chernobyl information.

Note: This article has previously appeared in Atlanta’s Heroine Magazine, with copyrights retained by the author Laura Callier.

Share This

No Breathing Easy In Beijing

Imagine air pollution so bad that you can’t even go outside…that’s what Beijing is currently experiencing - such horrible smog that government officials are urging citizens to stay in.

Suspended particulate matter, largely from coal burning plants and auto emissions make up the awful pollution, exacerbated by the lack of wind recently.

Beijing’s air quality has long been considered among the world’s worst, whereas…

England’s Ecotricity

On the other side of the planet, self described hippie Dale Vince has been using the windy air of the UK to create his highly successful company Ecotricity, providing wind turbine energy to over 22,000 customers. With the ability to be backed up by the grid if the wind ever falters, Vince promotes his turbines reminding us that wind will never run out, is 100% renewable, it produces no pollutants, and the turbines pay for themselves within the first 6 months in energy saved.

Wind energy is now price competitive with traditional energy sources in the U.K…too bad Beijing has had had such a lack of wind!

More about Ecotricity’s turbines:

*They’re quiet enough not to disturb people living nearby.

*They need to placed strategically so as not to disturb television signals.

*Turbines must be placed in areas sensitive to bird habitats. (Ecotricity’s statistics suggest that millions more birds are killed by cars each year than would ever be killed or harmed by wind turbines.)

For more info, click here for Ecotricity’s website.

Share This