Across the pond, Wessex Water is primarily focused on water supply, and sewage treatment services. Now they’re taking that waste expertise and applying it to the public transportation grid. The Bio Bus is a new 40-passenger bus built by Wessex underling GENeco. The bus runs solely on bio-methane gas, a compound made, in this case, exclusively from food waste and human waste.
The U.K.’s first poop-powered bus hit the road this week, ferrying fare-paying passengers around parts of south-west England. But banish from your mind the image of a vehicle kitted out with toilets for seats, with a bus-load of passengers happily knocking one out to get the thing to the next stop. The reality is a little different. This one runs solely on biomethane gas generated from human sewage and food waste. The 40-seat ‘Bio-Bus’ – to give it its official name – can travel up to 184 miles on a single tank of the gas, which is generated via a treatment process known as ‘anaerobic digestion.’ Gas production has proved so successful that some of it is also being injected into the national grid by a recently constructed state-of-the-art facility.
