during my visit to a rural town in India, around 500 kms from Mumbai, i heard of this farmer who bought a dozen cows that no longer can be milked. he bought them really cheap because these cows are of no use.

he developed an innovative shed for these cows. their dung was drained into a huge column where because of anaerobic respiration methane was produced. he used this methane to generate electricity which surprisingly suffices for his daily usage!

One use for all of that cow dung is as a source of energy-producing fuel, although there probably aren’t any systems in place to make this a large-scale process.

Sterilized cow dung makes an excellent fertilizer. Unfortunately, if it’s not sterilized properly there are serious public health risks to using cow dung on food crops. From what I’ve read, cow dung can essentially sterilize itself since it heats up like compost does, but you need to know what you’re doing to do it right.

Some small companies are now making surprisingly odor-free pots made from cow dung. The pots are biodegradable and are used for plants that are sold at gardening stores, etc. And the fertilizer-included feature is another plus for gardeners. Maybe we’ll start seeing more of this type of product. But it probably won’t use up all the cow dung on the planet .

Also, the cow-related methane doesn’t only come from the cow dung. It also comes from the digestive system of all ruminants – including cows, goats, and even elephants! They release methane in the gaseous form from both ends (to put it as politely as I know how). If only we could somehow harness that gas and use it as an energy source. But that’d be a pretty stinky job…. On the other hand, some landfills are scheduled to be “mined” for their methane gas, so it’s not a completely unheard of idea to harness methane from unusual sources.

If viewing spam is really the biggest use of energy, what about just dragging the spam message to your Trash/Delete bin without ever opening it? That’s generally recommended anyway for security and virus protection. But the energy savings is something else I’ll keep in mind now.

Like “titli” suggested, I have a separate email address that I only use with web sites that make you enter an email address (when I have no interest in getting email from them). I don’t even read the email that comes to that address. But after reading this article, I’ll try to adjust the account settings to delete all my mail more regularly. Until now I never thought about the electricity used for just storing junk emails.

For employers, spam isn’t just a security issue, considering the amount of server space the spam probably uses. If your place of work doesn’t have good spam filtering, maybe employees should point out to the accounting departments that this is wasting a lot of money in electricity as well as sever space (and equipment upkeep, if they maintain their own servers). My place of work made big improvements to spam filtering recently. I assumed this was just for security reasons, but maybe there
was a financial motive as well.

that sure sounds accurate according to the calculations done.. but considering the real life example, 2 hours seems high for one sheet of paper!