A university in South Korea has designed an eco-friendly toilet that turns waste into energy and cryptocurrency, which university students can use to buy food and coffee on campus.
The BeeVi toilet was created by urban and environmental engineering professor Cho Jae-weon,
A university in South Korea has designed an eco-friendly toilet that turns waste into energy and cryptocurrency, which university students can use to buy food and coffee on campus.
The BeeVi toilet was created by urban and environmental engineering professor Cho Jae-weon, who teaches at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST).
“If we think out of the box, feces has precious value to make energy and manure. I have put this value into ecological circulation,” Cho said, as carried by Reuters.
The innovative toilet has a vacuum pump that sends the waste to a tank underground. The toilet thus reduces water usage and has been called a “super water-saving vacuum toilet.”
In the tank in a lab, microorganisms turn the waste into methane. The gas then powers a hot-water boiler, a gas stove, and a solid oxide fuel cell, providing energy for the building.
The average human waste per day can be converted into 50 liters of methane gas, which could generate enough power to drive a car for nearly a mile, or to generate 0.5 kilowatts (kWh) of electricity, the South Korean professor says.
The eco-friendly toilet can be used by university students 