A dog park in Cambridge, Massachusetts is now using methane gas, produced by methanogenic Archaea from the anaerobic digestion of dog poop, to power the lights in the park (for a summary of the project, see this website).
People walking their dogs in the park are encouraged to collect their dogs' waste using biodegradable plastic doggie-doo collection bags (like the ones we used for our plastics biodegradation lab). Then the bags are fed into an anaerobic digester, where a consortium of Bacteria and Archaea digest the waste, producing a mixture of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2). The methane serves as a fuel to power the lights in the park.
Methanogenic bacteria are used in a wide range of other similar applications, including a sewage treatment plant in Renton, Washington that is entirely powered by fuel cells that use methane.
In addition to the benefit of generating energy from waste, another benefit is that the methane gets oxidized to CO2. Methane is more than 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2.
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