If you use the toilet, you can pay for your coffee or buy you a banana at a university in South Korea where human waste is used to power a building.
The history of toilets in Korea turning feces into cryptocurrency and digital currency has received a lot of attention lately.
Cho Jae-weon, professor of urban and environmental engineering at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), has designed an environmentally friendly toilet that is connected to a manure laboratory for biogas and manure production.
The BeeVi toilet – a combination of the words bee and vision – uses a vacuum pump to pump feces into an underground storage tank, thereby reducing water consumption. There, microorganisms break down the waste into methane, which serves as an energy source for the building and drives gas stoves, hot water boilers and solid oxide fuel cells.
He realized that human waste has valuable value in generating energy, so he put that value in an ecological cycle.
The average person excretes around 500 g per day, which can be converted into 50 liters of methane, said the environmental engineer.
Cho invented a virtual currency called Ggool, which means honey in Korean. Every eco-friendly toilet user earns 10 Ggool per day.
Students can use the currency to purchase goods on campus, from freshly brewed coffee to instant noodles, fruits, and books. In the shop, students can select the product they want and scan the QR code to pay with Ggool.
“I used to think poop was dirty, but now it’s a treasure of great value to me,” said Heo Hui-jin, PhD student of Ggool Market. “I even talk about poop while I’m eating to think about buying a book I want.
The story in Korea is not the first time that waste has been used to generate energy.
Previously, British farmers used cow dung to power Ethereum mining.
The company uses liquid manure – more precisely methane – to run its own hardware and mine climate-neutral cryptocurrency. They and their customers mine cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (ETH) but not Bitcoin (BTC) “because it is not as energy efficient as other coins and not as profitable,” said Riddett.
An American team also extracted rumen fluid from a live cow. They then made a battery by pouring the liquid into one of two glass containers, each about the size of a two-liter beverage bottle. The other box is filled with ferricyanide – a chemical needed to complete the power generation cycle. The two glass boxes are insulated from each other by a special material that enables the protons to get from the cathode to the anode. The displacement of protons and electrons along the conductor connecting the two boxes induces an electric current. The generated voltage peaked at 600 millivolts – roughly half that required to run an AA battery. After 4 days it dropped to 200 millivolts, but the researchers increased the voltage again by simply adding the cellulose. “Although the voltage generated is very low, the results also show that this technique can generate electricity from cow waste,” said Ann Christy, co-author of the study from Ohio State University.
Christy and his colleagues have also developed similar batteries, but using cow dung rather than rumen fluid. The potential generated is between 300 and 400 millivolts. “We ran several tests over 30 days without any loss of performance.”
Christy said. “Both studies show cow litter as a promising source of electricity. It is cheap and abundant and could one day become a useful source of renewable energy for developing countries. “
The news that toilets could generate digital currency in South Korea has received some social media attention, and some are calling it an “ingenious” creation. However, many in the crypto community scoffed at the concept, literally calling the digital currency “the king of shit coins”.
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Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, 22nd November 2024, Chainwire
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