A new study from rural china says that biogas, a clean-burning fuel produced from animal waste, can significantly reduce both the harmful effects of IAP and greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the World Health Organisation, some 700 million people in rural China are affected by IAP, leading to approximately 420,000 premature deaths each year. In response, the Chinese government has subsidised the installation of more than 10 million bio-generators (also called anaerobic digesters) that use microbes to convert animal or human waste into clean-burning biogas, and systems to pipe this directly into rural homes.
Using biogas instead of traditional fuel sources such as coal, wood and crop waste has the potential to cut IAP and greenhouse gas emissions. Biogas, however, is predominantly methane – a potent greenhouse gas – leading scientists to worry that any leakages may mean such biogas systems are net contributors to global warming.
But new research into biogas in rural China, undertaken by an international team at the Department of Environmental Health at Emory University in Atlanta has found that using biogas fuel (even allowing for 10% with leaky systems) can cut contributions to global warming by up to 54% when compared against traditional fuels over the course of 20 years.
“The study is the first to demonstrate that in addition to improving public health, using anaerobic digesters could benefit the climate” says Kirk Smith, a professor of global environmental health at the University of California, Berkeley. “That's a significant contribution”.
Justin Remais, an assistant professor of environmental health at Emory University and his team researched six villages in Sichuan Province, covering 67 households. Thirty-five of the families burned traditional fuels for household needs while the remaining 32 households used biogas from anaerobic digesters.
The researchers concluded that if Chinese people living in rural areas switched to biogas, it would not only make a serious dent on the 420,000 premature deaths each in year, it would dramatically impact greenhouse gas emissions.
Read the full study here.
Read more about the process of generating biogas from waste in this excellent article on the Chemical and Engineering News website.
