Climate Craziness of the Week: Poo Power from your dog

All registered dog owners will be required to submit 340 grammes of dogpoo to their local council every day or face heavy fines.
Another reason to resist registering your dog

If it was that good an idea the world would be full of powerstations using human and farm animal waste. This kind of electricitty production has been known about for decades.

A word on collection

… and then we will get trucks running all over Australia to collect said poo and drive it to a central place, like the capital and dump it there.

“I am tempted to believe the guy who dreamed it up, Duncan Chew, must be playing a joke on our environmentalists – yet he is now laughing all the way to the bank, ”
Playing a joke and laughing on his way to the bank are not mutually exclusive. I wonder if I can work that scam on my (UK) government?

Sorry to poo poo your scepticism guys, but the basic technology behind this idea has already been demonstrated. Essentially the idea is to extract methane from poo. This paper demonstrates over 70% methane recovery.
http://www.iwaponline.com/wst/06504/wst065040604.htm

ABSTRACT
This paper demonstrates the potential for recovering dissolved methane from low temperature anaerobic processes treating domestic wastewater. In the absence of methane recovery, ca. 45% of the produced methane is released as a fugitive emission which results in a net carbon footprint of -0.47 kg CO2e m-3. A poly-di-methyl-siloxane (PDMS) membrane contactor was applied to support sweep gas desorption of dissolved methane using nitrogen. The dense membrane structure controlled gaseous mass transfer thus recovery was maximised at low liquid velocities. At the lowest liquid velocity, VL, of 0.0025 m s-1, 72% of the dissolved methane was recovered. A vacuum was also trialled as an alternative to sweep-gas operation. At vacuum pressures below 30 mbar, reasonable methane recovery was observed at an intermediate VL of 0.0056 m s-1. Results from this study demonstrate that dissolved methane recovery could increase net electrical production from low temperature anaerobic processes by ca. +0.043 kWhe m-3 and reduce the net carbon footprint to +0.01 kg CO2e m-3. However, further experimental work to optimise the gas-side hydrodynamics is required as well as validation of the long-term impacts of biofouling on process performance.

“Where there’s muck, there’s brass”

If a dog poops out .34kg per day, and a kg is still 2.2 pounds, that equals .73lb or just short of 12 ounces of feces per day. Somewhere I read that the average human’s output is about 8oz per day, which I think is too low, but which, if true, brings up the question: What kinds of dogs are submitting their poops to this measurement? Does the average dog produce 50% more actual poop by weight than the average human? I think the output must be to some extent proportional to body weight, though I realize that different species and individuals have different metabolisms, diets, and other factors. Still, a second question remains: If the weight of the droppings is as wildly inaccurate as it appears to me to be, and if transportation of feces to processing sites has not been accurately factored into the process, how can the government justify this grant? Third question: At what stage of freshness is this dog manure useful? It would seem quite a burden for the humans who feed these dogs to have to collect their waste immediately upon extrusion; and yet, if one waits until the stuff gets dry and brittle, it might not have quite the oomph it needs for the stated purpose. Just some practical questions among many that might be asked . . .

Geoff Sherrington wrote:
“A story from the time of Chairman Mao goes that there were too many rats, so citizens had to front up to depots once a week with X rat tails per head…”
It ain’t no “story”.
About the same time as “progressives” in America were getting all worked up about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the glorious people’s revolution in China declared war on sparrows (and rats).

Four Pests Campaign
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
The Great sparrow campaign also known as the Kill a sparrow campaign, and officially, the Four Pests campaign was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.[1] The extermination of the latter upset the ecological balance, and enabled crop-eating insects to proliferate.
Campaign
The campaign against the ‘Four Pests’ was initiated in 1958 as a hygiene campaign by Mao Zedong, who identified the need to exterminate mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. Sparrows – mainly the Eurasian Tree Sparrow[1][2] – were included on the list because they ate grain seeds, robbing the people of the fruits of their labour. The masses of China were mobilized to eradicate the birds, and citizens took to banging pots and pans or beating drums to scare the birds from landing, forcing them to fly until they fell from the sky in exhaustion. Sparrow nests were torn down, eggs were broken, and nestlings were killed.[1][3] Sparrows and other birds were shot down from the sky, resulting in the near-extinction of the birds in China.[4] Non-material rewards and recognition were offered to schools, work units and government agencies in accordance with the volume of pests they had killed.
By April 1960, Chinese leaders realized that sparrows ate a large amount of insects, as well as grains.[3][2] Rather than being increased, rice yields after the campaign were substantially decreased.[1][2] Mao ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows, replacing them with bedbugs in the ongoing campaign against the Four Pests.[3] By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned,[1] swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides. Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine in which upwards of 30 million people died of starvation.

Eliminating the last sparrow
http://chineseposters.net/posters/e16-34.php
Great Sparrow campaign 1957

The Great Sparrow campaign documentary

It’s a conspiracy!
I saw an advert for this on tv: Doggie Doo game
“Around 15 years ago, toy inventors at Lund and Company Invention created a pooping dog game that made loud farting sounds as you squeezed the dog’s leash! Since most kids on the face of the earth find humor in all bodily functions, Lund was sure this pooping dog would be the next craze of the late 90’s. All they needed was to find the dog a master — a “toy industry expert” to adopt the concept and turn the dog into the next mega hit game!”
They are brainwashing kids to be comfortable with dog muck so they will obey.
/sarc
Gnome said: “All registered dog owners will be required to submit 340 grammes of dogpoo to their local council every day or face heavy fines.”
Is it okay if I put it in their letterbox?
I was amused at the specious accuracy of the claim “Within the City of Yarra there are approximately 6078 dogs that generate over 750 tonnes of waste every year”. Why not just say over 6000 dogs?

Well, it may look like a joke, but according to this http://www.scienceinpublic.com.au/inspiringaus/inspiringvictoria#more-11357 it is indeed genuinely supported by Australian Government:
“About the grants
… A total of $5 million has been awarded across the country in three levels of grant categories…
The prime objective of the program is to increase the engagement of Australians in science … Inspiring Australia is an initiative of the Australian Government.”
And also:
“Other grant recipients include:
…
• Animations will be developed to communicate complex climate change science issues to the public ($39,000).
…
• In the future, could dog poo power your BBQ? Melbourne man Duncan Chew has received a $45,000 Unlocking Australia’s Potential grant, to build and install a “digester” in a city park that will turn dog poo into a biogas.”

mwhite says:
August 19, 2012 at 2:39 am
“If it was that good an idea the world would be full of powerstations using human and farm animal waste. This kind of electricitty production has been known about for decades.”
My home state Lower Saxony is indeed full of biogas converters; and they were meant to process animal waste and plant leftovers, and subsidized greatly.
Over time, the farmers found out that corn is a much better feedstock than manure.
These days they run nearly exclusively on corn, and most of the fields around them are used to grow corn.
This Australian guy is a little behind the curve, but if it helps him to attract taxpayer money…