Animal poop digester has Abbotsford man in running for award

An Abbotsford man says he is turning cow and chicken poop into valuable resources and he may get international recognition for his efforts.

Chris Bush of the Catalyst Agri-Innovations Society says his system takes cow and chicken poop and converts it to natural gas, water, and even a feed product grown with excess CO2 all using anaerobic digestion as a starting point.

"As long as there are living creatures on this planet, we have to have food and water. And if we're living well, we need to have energy," Bush toldOn The Coastguest host GloriaMacarenko.

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"There's no such thing as waste: only sometimes a resource at a time and a place without a technology."

Bush's work has him in the running as a finalist for aSingularity UniversityGlobal Grand Challenge Award,which honours advancements the organization believes "will shift humanity from an era of scarcity to one of abundance."

New wrinkle on old technology

Anaerobic digestion technology has been used for over a century but is usually focused on burning methane from animal waste to generate electricity.

Bush says his is a more complete system: instead of burning the methane, his cleans the natural gas and injects it into the natural gas grid for use byhomes and businesses. He says his system currently takes in food processing waste and feces from 800 cows, 100,000 chickens to provide natural gas for 1,000 homes.

He says "the big play" of his technology is that it also produces an animal feed called duckweed he says is more efficient thancorn or soy feed and "eats all the CO2 we can feed it."

"It goes beyond zero waste," he said.

Bush says even using animal feces to its fullest potential, progress can be made towards the goal of zero-waste agriculture while also improving food security.

Singularity University's Global Grand Challenge Awards will be handed out Aug. 28-30 during itsGlobal Summit in San Francisco.

With files form CBC Radio One's On The Coast