The Power of Pooh

3/30/2014 @ 1:53PM / By Marty Anderson

For the past several months I have been working on the ground with a multidisciplinary team of young doctors and technology entrepreneurs looking at innovative ways to manage the vast amounts of waste we humans deposit in our water supply.

Of course, because this is the amazing 21st Century, we learned the “usual” post dot.com miraculous stuff.

We can generate enough electricity from human waste to power cities. We can clean up our water for pennies, not billions of dollars.

We can use novel genetic engineering and math to modify bacteria in our septic tanks to produce drinking water from sewage, mine increasingly scarce minerals from our waste at high profit, generate biogas to power the sewage mining and purification processes, even mine precious metals from our pooh.

We may use the same genetic engineering to recover industrial chemicals from the Maquiladora-saturated Rio Grande.

Genetically modified bacteria can tune sewage sludge to create customized fertilizer that reduces the amount of irrigation water we need to create the food we eat…and the 30% we throw away...


More:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/babson/2014/03/30/the-power-of-pooh/