Sewage savings

Canberra Times
Wednesday 7/11/2007 Page: 7

A small community in northwest England is hoping to become the country's first carbon-neutral village and is considering the power of poop to help make it happen. The 1000 residents of Ashton Hayes have been working on cutting their "carbon footprint" since 2006 and have already managed to slash the amount of carbon emissions the village produces by a fifth. So far village residents have managed to curb their emissions through careful use of electricity, investing in green power devices for their homes and cutting down on unnecessary carbon emitting activities.

Most people switched to energy-saving light bulbs; many started car-sharing and cut down on flights. The keenest put solar panels or wind turbines on their roofs and have even set up "carbon clinics" to offer help. The villagers realise the next 20 per cent of emissions will be harder to cut than the first. Ashton Hayes produced 4765 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year before the project began, already below average for a village of its size.

Project chief Garry Charnock said he now plans to build a "MicroGrid" near the church to power the village using wind energy, wood chips or methane from village waste. He has enlisted help from local water provider United Utilities, which already has a prototype method for generating methane from village sewage. The water company spent £22 million last year developing the technology, which generates electricity by capturing and burning methane released by decomposing sewage.

United Utilities carbon manager Chris Matthews has invited a delegation from the village to inspect the progress at its research and development lab at nearby Ellesmere Port. The path towards poop power first began with Charnock, an environmental consultant who convinced the village's parish councillors to hold a meeting on a cold night in January to discuss the idea. Some 400 people - three-quarters of the village's adult population - crammed into the school to hear him speak and express their support.

That's when a flurry of the first initiatives sprang up across the village empowering residents who, like most people, had already been thinking about their environmental impact. "Why did people take to it? I think that people suddenly felt that an organised thing gave them some sort of permission to do things that they knew they wanted to do, but weren't inclined to do on their own - safety in numbers," village resident Richard May said.

Charnock has tried to make a conscious effort to avoid formal structures so the project can evolve naturally. Consequently, there are a number of initiatives like that of the village school, which has an eco-club where student "eco-monitors" are charged with turning off lights and computers. "We are just a bunch of people in a village seeing what we can do," he said.