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All aboard the Poo Bus! Ding ding, route Number Two departing

Only another three days of pooing and I can have a ride!

Next week punters travelling between Bristol and Bath will be able to ride on a bus ultimately powered by human poo, the first ever such service in the UK.

The 40-seater "Bio-Bus" will run up to two times a day and is expected to carry around 10,000 passengers a month by tour operator Bath Bus Company. It can travel up to 300km on a full tank of pressurised methane, which is produced from the equivalent annual waste of five people.

The Bio-Bus will be powered by people living in the area "including quite possibly those on the bus itself," said Mohammed Saddiq, GENeco general manager - the company which generates the biomethane gas that will fuel the service. This is done at the Bristol sewage works.

Bristol sewage treatment works annually treats around 75 million cubic metres of sewage waste and 35,000 tonnes of food waste, collected from households, supermarkets and food manufacturers. Through a process known as anaerobic digestion, 17 million cubic metres of biomethane is generated a year at the Bristol plant. GENeco said this could power 8,300 homes, though in fact most of it is used to power the treatment plant itself. However there is a surplus of biogas left over for projects such as the Poo Bus.

In 2010 GENeco powered a car on biomethane produced during the sewage treatment process. The Bio-Bug was used in various trials to see how viable it was to power a vehicle on sewage gas.

Using the annual waste generated from one busload of passengers would provide enough power for the Poo Bus to travel a return journey from Lands End to John O’Groats, said Wessex Water.

The company told El Reg it hoped the service would be introduced across the city next year, when Bristol becomes European Green Capital.

In which case residents had better start getting used to the taste of prunes. ®

Bootnote

<Data Journalism>

If the bus runs twice a day (doing a 40km return Bath-Bristol each time and potentially taking as many as 80 people on return trips daily) for a year, it will travel almost 30,000km and need filling up a hundred times, using up the poo of 500 people. The bus needs at least four people pooing for every one riding: and that's before allowing for the much larger amounts of biogas which are used up running the digesters and gas-upgrading machinery at the sewage plant which produce the gas for the bus.

Realistically, poo buses are not going to be a significant factor in the transport of the future. - Ed

</Data Journalism>

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