Your Poop Is Powerful Beyond Measure And May Soon Fuel Your Apartment

The digester eggs at the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant.

I've always been of the mind that "shit" is an underrated word. The term has an oomph to it, bears both positive and negative connotations, and saying it feels, well, like a release.

That said, I'm delighted to bring you shit news today, in the sense that this story is indeed about human waste, and it's also pretty cool! The New York Post reports that Brooklyn's Newtown Creek Wastewater Plant is processing New Yorkers' gassy refuse into methane gas.

The dung (known as Renewable Natural Gas, or RNG) will then be used to heat over 5,000 homes in the area, and possibly more in the future if it extends to other facilities. "Collecting and treating the more than 1 billion gallons of wastewater produced in New York City every day is essential to public health and the protection of the environment, but it also offers a significant opportunity to mine the resources in that waste stream for clean, reliable energy,” said DEP Commissioner Vincent Sapienza in a statement. “At no cost to ratepayers, these projects will harness a byproduct of the wastewater treatment process to provide renewable natural gas to local residents while helping to clean the air we all breathe.”

As an added bonus, converting human waste into renewable energy also helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as Scientific American writes.

The program, run jointly by National Grid and the Department of Environmental Protection, aims to be the first of its kind in the United States. According to the DEP, the Newtown Creek facility's digester eggs break down organic waste into water, carbon dioxide, and biogas, the latter of which is primarily methane. The plant currently uses roughly half of the biogas it produces to heat the facility itself, but is looking to recycle it entirely. So Newtown Creek is constructing a purification system to put human gas into New York's local natural gas distribution system.

All of which means that dookies will fuel the likes of your stove where you cook food...to then poop out again. Isn't life's cyclical nature awe-inspiring?

"We have found a gas well in the middle of Brooklyn,” Donald Chahbazpour, Gas Utility of the Future director at the National Grid power company, told The Post. Through this, officials are hoping to save 90,000 metric tons of carbon emissions—comparable to taking 19,000 cars off the road, according to a fact sheet provided to Gothamist.

They're currently aiming to roll out the project by the end of the year, the DEP says. (It's unclear as of right now which homes might imminently receive the gift of a human dump.)

New York isn't the only city pursuing excrement as an alternative energy source. According to The Guardian, Grand Junction, Colorado's Persigo Wastewater Treatment Plant has been processing lots of poop into renewable natural gas, which they've been using to fuel the likes of street sweepers, buses and, yes, dump trucks.

If you're wondering if the gas will reek throughout your apartment, the answer is apparently no. But look, if you've lived here this long and you're still grossed out by the idea of defecation, I'm not entirely sure New York's mean streets are where you're meant to be. I hear Miami is lovely this time of year.