Don’t think of sewage as waste, says environmental engineer and 2015 MacArthur fellow Kartik Chandran. The water you flush down the toilet is enriched in nitrogen, organic carbon and more, and Chandran wants to tap into this resource for agricultural use and energy production.
Chandran has designed toilets in rural Ghana that extract nutrients from urine to fertilize crops. At his Columbia University laboratory, he is searching for ways to convert fecal sludge into biodiesel, combining engineering, biology and microbial ecology to turn wastewater into a valuable resource, helping underserved communities protect their local environment and profit from their waste.
– Donna Scaramastra Gorman, The Engineering 100