Professors at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, near the southeastern coast of the country, have designed a toilet that converts methane from one's faeces into an energy source.
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Using a toilet can pay for your coffee or buy you bananas at a university in South Korea, where human waste is being used to help power a building. Cho Jae-weon, an urban and environmental engineering professor at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), has designed an eco-friendly toilet connected to a laboratory that uses excrement to produce biogas and manure.
Students who use the toilet are rewarded with 10 units of digital currency called Ggool per day. Ggool, which means honey in Korean, can be used at a market on campus to buy items like bananas, stationery, and instant cup noodles, reported Reuters.
The toilet has been coined the "BeeVi", a shortened version of "Toilet, like a Bee with a Vision," and is meant to be an eco-friendly and sustainable device.
The BeeVi toilet - a portmanteau of the words bee and vision - uses a vacuum pump to send faeces into an underground tank, reducing water use. There, microorganisms break down the waste to methane, which becomes a source of energy for the building, powering a gas stove, hot-water boiler and solid oxide fuel cell.
“If we think out of the box, faeces has precious value to make energy and manure. I have put this value into ecological circulation," Cho said.
An average person defecates about 500g a day, which can be converted to 50 litres of methane gas, the environmental engineer said. This gas can generate 0.5kWh of electricity or be used to drive a car for about 1.2km (0.75 miles).
A postgraduate student purchasing items at the Ggool market told Reuters that he now sees poop as a "treasure" because of the new toilet.
"I even talk about faeces during mealtimes to think about buying any book I want," he said.
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