Should dogs be banned for environmental reasons?
So you'd sooner ban dogs than allow their waste to be used as an energy source? You do love your fossil fuel companies...
bramzzoinks said:
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21661671-city-ponders-plan-make-power-puppy-poop-crap-shoot?fsrc=scn%2Ffb%2Fwl%2Fpe%2Fst%2Facrapshoot
But the popularity of four-legged friends has an icky cost: dogs squeeze out more than twice the waste of the average person, or around 275 pounds a year.
And average dog produces more waste than the average person??? Seems hard to believe.
Still, this gives me a great idea for the post office site - a community methane digester. We can all bring the poop from our dogs and cats and put it in the digester. The methane gas can then power the Village.
tjohn said:
bramzzoinks said:And average dog produces more waste than the average person??? Seems hard to believe.
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21661671-city-ponders-plan-make-power-puppy-poop-crap-shoot?fsrc=scn%2Ffb%2Fwl%2Fpe%2Fst%2Facrapshoot
But the popularity of four-legged friends has an icky cost: dogs squeeze out more than twice the waste of the average person, or around 275 pounds a year.
Some of us produce more waste than others.
I'd have thought someone would be laying low today instead of starting another troll bait thread.
yahooyahoo said:
As Steve Martin once asked, "Does the Pope sh*t in the woods?"
What a ridiculous argument. I venture rarely into All Politics so I missed this.
By most accounts, a Canadian Goose can produce a pound (or two) of poop a day. No one is routinely cleaning it up. There are more than 5 million Canadian Geese in the US. That's 325 million pounds of guano that is clogging our waterways and paths in our parks. Yet, they are protected species...
Oh and what about regular birds, just pooping all over? And deer? And raccoons? Oy vay! I think we should just get rid of all domestic- and wild-life...
And if you really want to reduce methane, everyone should be forced to be vegan. Cows and chickens are HUGE methane producers.
festus said:
How about banning jackasses, especially the human kind?
I'm all for that! Who gets to decide? (Please say me, please say me... )
Because banning dogs would destroy a lot of dog product / support service jobs.
Dogs are the only animals said to have domesticated themselves. We allied with them thousands of years ago and have had a wonderful symbiotic relationship ever since.
We should stop eating cows (mad cow), pigs (swine flu), and chickens (bird flu). That would greatly help the environment.
Great suggestion for Labor Day barbecue, eh?
I'm with Mel Brooks. The only thing I consume is cool mountain water, 10 degrees below room temperature. Just that! (That, and a stuffed cabbage).
Seems like dogs are bad for the environment and global warming. Why isn't the statist left campaigning to ban them?
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21661671-city-ponders-plan-make-power-puppy-poop-crap-shoot?fsrc=scn%2Ffb%2Fwl%2Fpe%2Fst%2Facrapshoot
"DOGS, unlike people, are capable of pure love—at least according to Freud. As ever more Americans live alone, unconditional affection is in demand. Pet ownership has risen for decades. More than a third of homes have at least one dog, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. But the popularity of four-legged friends has an icky cost: dogs squeeze out more than twice the waste of the average person, or around 275 pounds a year. With over 83m pooches roaming the country, that is a lot of poop. Around 60% of the stuff gets scooped and trucked to landfills, where it releases methane, a greenhouse gas. The rest delivers surprises to pedestrians and can contaminate waterways, as carnivorous diets create pathogen-rich waste.
The problem is particularly bad in cities, where green spaces are few and lonely souls seeking puppy love plentiful. New York boasts over 600,000 hounds—one for every 14 people—generating over 100,000 tons of turd a year. Some of it smudges unlucky stilettoes, but most is dutifully tossed into rubbish bins and hauled to landfills, at a cost of over $100 per ton. This is a missed opportunity, says Ron Gonen, the city’s former recycling tsar. Now in the private sector, he is trying to launch “Sparky Power”, a programme to transform dog waste into clean energy in the city’s dog parks.
The idea is to fit parks with small anaerobic digesters. Dog owners would place their mongrels’ mounds into the machine, which then converts poo to gas for powering lamps and other park equipment. A year-long pilot would introduce digesters in three parks at a cost of around $100,000. The parks department is pondering the proposal. Similar schemes in other cities have proved short-lived. An underground Energy Transformation Using Reactive Digestion (E-TURD) device created by Arizona State University students for a dog park in Gilbert, Arizona, in 2012 ultimately failed.
“It’s great to turn it into a biofuel, but first you gotta pick it up,” says Tom Boyd, an entrepreneur in Tennessee. His company, Poo Prints, shames the owners of dogs who fail to clean up their messes by testing DNA in uncollected coils. There are enough offenders to secure a new customer every two hours, he says. Most are landlords of smart apartment complexes, but in September the company launches its first district-wide programme—in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham, naturally."