Back in January 2014, in an RTE exposé, the Irish columnist, playwright and scriptwriter, Fiona Looney hit the headlines, world-wide by announcing she had located a couple of dog turds on the pavements around Thurles.
Tipperary Municipal District Councillors, would-be future political hopefuls and resident politicians (currently in receipt of €89,965 basic pay; latter part of the Lansdowne Road agreement), please take note ahead of your next Council or Cabinet meeting; here is the perfect project to “get your teeth into”. 😉
The good news is that this ongoing “Doggy Doo problem” haunting the town may now have become short lived, thanks to one man, namely a Mr Brian Harper, a native of Worcestershire, in England.
Mr Harper, is experimenting with a dog turd-powered street gas light, which is currently helping to light the darkness for those descending from dog walks in the Malvern Hills; latter an outstanding area of natural beauty. Worcestershire is also the home of that delicious Lea & Perrins ‘Worcestershire sauce’.
It works like this; dog walkers in this Worcestershire area are provided with free compostable bags and encouraged to deposit their dogs do-do into a hatch which leads to an anaerobic digester positioned beside a street gas light. Dog owners are then encouraged to turn a handle five times, which in turn helps to break down the contents in the digester, thus producing methane to fuel this particular street light.
Ten standard bags of dog turds are deemed sufficient to provide up to two hours of gas light, as dog walkers return from the areas hills at dusk. It remains essential that those contributing to the digester, do not use ordinary plastic bags, but rather compostable bags, since the use of plastic would block it.
We originally produced this video, hereunder, in 2014 – nearly four years ago – did anything change or get updated in Thurles?
The English idea for this gas light was borrowed from conceptual artist Matthew Mazzotta who is using dog faeces to power lampposts in a park in Cambridge, Massachusetts state in New England.
The English street gas lamp began receiving doggy doo from passing walkers back in mid-November 2017 and its presence had already resulted in a reduction of dog faeces in the area.
So what happens the left-over faeces when all the methane is depleted, I hear you ask?
This digester product can be turned into harmless garden fertiliser, to which even Fiona Looney would have no objection.
So, all you Tipperary developers, inventors, young scientists and entrepreneur; I am handing you a goldmine here, so get to work you ungrateful lot, or do I really have to do everything myself.
P.S. In particular the €4.5 Million Euro National Bio-economy Centre starting up at Lisheen Mines should take note; you know the place to which I refer, some 400 jobs were triumphantly replaced by 40 in the recent past.
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