"We use human waste [and] turn it into energy,” says Osero, an environmental scientist at Kenyatta University in Kenya.
Osero and some colleagues crafted a process for turning what’s flushed down the toilet into a green energy source, a gas that can be burned as fuel for stoves or to generate electricity. They already have a prototype up and running near Nairobi, and now they’re ready to expand.
“Mostly we want to work with places where we have large populations, where you can get high accumulation of those wastes,” Osero says. “We want to replicate that idea in the whole country” of Kenya.
Osero’s project is just one of several dozen ideas recently showcased at the Climate CoLab conference at MIT. It’s a little like a hackers convention, except that everyone is hacking climate change. All the ideas being discussed grew out of an online community called the Climate CoLab, run out of MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence.
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