A 19-year-old boy has claimed he uses human poo to make electricity. The young man identified as Thabo Ramatse, from Soweto in South Africa, says if there is enough of poo, he hopes to solve the country’s power generation problems.
He said he got the idea from his mum, who told him about a woman who had fallen into a pit toilet and died because of the heat in the hole.
“This made me realise pit toilets have loads of power,” he said.
In 2015 he decided to test his theory.
First Thabo caught poo fumes in a plastic squeeze bottle. He closed the lid and threw the bottle into a fire.
When the bottle popped before it caught fire he carried on with his experiment.
“I scraped nails with sandpaper and dipped them in methanol before I attached the nails to a wire. “I inserted the wire inside a pit toilet where the kak was boiling. “Then I attached the wire to a light bulb.”
The heat from the human waste heated up the wire and the bulb lit up.
The energy that Thabo creates is similar to what happens inside your stomach when you eat food. Poo gradually gets broken down into biogas.
Thabo wants government to use his idea to create jobs for unemployed young people.
He said he was trying to find ways to generate electricity using acid and turbines