New York City eats a lot. And it’s not always efficient — we buy groceries we forget about, platters of food we can’t finish, and restaurant food that shields us from seeing things like the pile of potato peelings that go into making mountains of fries. Plus, as a result of eating, we also create a lot of human waste. But in a pilot program, New York City is taking both kinds of waste and using it to heat 5,200 city homes, MNN writes.
This is a few steps more complicated than burning your trash pile. Instead of sending the food waste out to landfills, the city is mixing it with wastewater sludge at a treatment plant. There, it will produce methane-rich biogas, which will be purified into commercially useable natural gas and used to heat homes. Really, it’s like these apartments will be heated by a really, really technical and complicated bag of flaming poo.
