China a Good Business Model for Human Feces Management

Feb 02, 2015 05:59 AM EST

(Photo : Reuters) A combination photograph shows (L) a public toilet in a half-demolished old town where new skyscrapers will be built in Beijing February 21, 2013 and (R) a boy using a toilet inside a department store at a shopping district in Beijing April 2, 2013. Cheap but crowded neighbourhoods are being cleared across China as part of a stepped-up "urbanisation" campaign by China's new leaders.

Instead of the mass migration in China from rural to urban areas adding to the central government's problems, such as the large volume of human waste from migrants, a German engineer is helping the Asian giant tap toilet matter into good business opportunity.

This is by converting human feces into biogas and fertilizer.

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In 2013, China's urban population had overtaken its rural population when the former breached the 731 million mark, resulting in urban headcount higher by 100 million, Bloomberg reports.

In Beijing alone, city residents' excrement treated every day is about 6,800 tons, which is enough to fill three Olympic-size swimming pools.

In the past 10 years, the capital city's population doubled to 21 million, leading to a big jump in yearly volume of human waste processed to 300 tons daily, according to Zhang Jiang, general manager of Beijing Century Green Environmental Engineering & Technology, the operator of night-soil treatment plants.

Heinz Peter Mang, the German engineer who is helping China convert its human waste into recyclable and useful resource, is expanding the project from Beijing into other Chinese cities and provinces. He even believes it could also be replicated in other countries, especially countries with large populations.

The 57-year-old Mang, who coordinates the project with graduate students from the University of Science and Technology and Beijing, says China is a good model for other nations to emulate when it comes to harnessing human feces for energy.

Mang, who came to China in 1982 as a fresh graduate with a degree in environmental engineering with a master's thesis on sustainable uses of sewage sludge, brought along his experiences on feces management learned in Africa and Cuba.

In the next five years, the business of major treatment operators is expected to increase 200 to 400 percent in volume, Credit Suisse wrote in its Oct. 6 note of China's environment sector.

To better harvest and manage China's poo resources, Mang pushes for more lights in public toilets since people use them all hours of the night and unless the feces are dumped correctly in the toilets rather than on floors, it would become wasted waste, he points out.