ULSAN, South Korea — 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.
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, …
Keep on reading: South Korean toilet turns excrement into power and digital currency