The toilet turns feces into energy and cryptocurrency

The BeeVi eco-friendly toilet, an invention from a university in Korea, partly makes life easier for students.

Cho Jae-weon, a lecturer in the Department of Environmental Engineering at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), is the creator of the BeeVi, a toilet that can turn manure into biogas and fertilizer.

To save water, BeeVi will suck manure into an underground storage tank. Here, microorganisms will break down the waste, forming methane gas. The gas is then converted into energy to power a building on campus.

Cho Jae-weon stands next to a cesspool in Ulsan. (Photo: Reuters).

Thanks to this invention, students at the building can use electricity for free. In addition, each time BeeVi is used, it is converted into a unit of internally circulating cryptocurrency named "Ggool" , meaning "Honey".

Students can use Ggool to buy many things on campus such as coffee, ramyeon noodles or even books . Each BeeVi user will earn 10 Ggool a day.

"If you think about it broadly, manure has a value in creating energy and fertilizer. What I do is put that value in the cycle , " said Mr. Cho.

500 grams of faeces, the average person excretes in a day, can produce 50 liters of methane. According to Mr. Cho, this amount of gas helps to generate about 0.5 kWh of electricity, enough for an electric car to travel 1.2 km.

When all toilets on campus are replaced with BeeVi, the amount of clean electricity generated is huge.

"I no longer see poop as a dirty substitute, now it's a treasure to me. I even talk about poop at meals when I think about the books I want" , Heo Hui-jin, UNIST alumni said.