British ‘poo bus’ goes into service: It runs on human sewage, food waste and smells like a bus

Louise Downing, Bloomberg News | November 20, 2014

A bus running on gas made from human sewage and food waste will today begin ferrying passengers between two British cities. The “Bio-Bus” will transport 40 passengers a time between Bristol Airport and Bath in the U.K.’s southwest, Wessex Water Services Ltd., the company behind the vehicle, said in an e- mailed statement. It’s Britain’s first bus to be powered using gas derived from such waste, it said. The bus can travel up to 300 kilometres on one tank of gas, which takes the annual waste of about five people. “Gas-powered vehicles have an important role to play in improving air quality in U.K. cities but the Bio-Bus goes further than that and is actually powered by people living in the local area, including quite possibly those on the bus itself,” Mohammed Saddiq, the general manager of Geneco, a unit of Bath-based Wessex Water, said in the statement. The company also has started injecting gas made from food waste and sewage into the grid to power more than 8,000 homes, it said in the statement. Britain’s water companies are increasingly turning to waste as a source of power to cut bills and increase energy security. Severn Trent Plc, the country’s second-largest publicly traded water company, last month began injecting gas from sewage into the grid.