At one university in South Korea, where human waste is being used to help power a building, using the lavatory can earn you bananas or coffee.Professor of urban and environmental engineering at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Cho Jae-weon, has created an environmentally friendly lavatory that is linked to a lab that generates manure and biogas from human waste.
The BeeVi toilet, which is a combination of the words “bee” and “vision,” uses less water by forcing waste into an underground tank via a vacuum pump. There, waste is broken down by microorganisms into methane, which is used as the building’s energy source to run a solid oxide fuel cell, gas cooker and hot water boiler.
According to the environmental engineer, an average person excretes 500g of waste per day, which can be transformed into 50 litres of methane gas. This petrol can power a car for roughly 1.2 km (0.75 miles) or produce 0.5kWh of electricity.Cho created the virtual currency known as Ggool, which translates to “honey” in Korean. Every user of the environmentally friendly loo receives 10 Ggool daily.
