As oil continued to pour into the Gulf of Mexico on a recent Saturday, Jennifer Wilkerson spent three hours on the phone talking about life after petroleum.

By Gar Smith, Earth Island Journal. Posted December 28, 2009.

There is a 'toilet revolution' taking shape -- and it may be coming just in time.

Upwards of 3 million people die annually from diarrhea, dysentery, and parasitic diseases -- all for the want of clean water. Meanwhile, each year in the water-rich United States, 2.1 billion gallons of the world's most precious liquid are used, not to water thirsty crops or slake parched throats, but to flush human waste from home toilets to municipal sewers. While harvesting rainwater and recycling graywater are fine strategies, it's time to get to the seat of the problem. We need a Toilet Revolution.

As frequently happens, the solution to this modern problem can be found in the recent past -- and the Third World present. Jeff Conant, author of The Community Guide to Environmental Health, has traveled the world in search of the perfect "waterless toilet." He found it in the Mexican town of Tepotzlan, which boasts hundreds of "non-traditional waterless" eco-loos. In the 1980s, Tepotzlan's innovators got a boost when former UNICEF worker Ron Sawyer settled in to help the locals design a new generation of "eco-san" toilets.

While the practice of using human waste as fertilizer is as old as humanity itself, Tepotzlan's eco-sanistas marked an engineering watershed when they found a way to separate feces from urine. A locally designed toilet seat harvests the fluids while allowing the solid wastes to fall into a dry compost toilet. (Not such a strange idea: The human body is designed to send solid and liquid wastes in opposite directions.) One immediate result of separating pee from poo is the elimination of the unpleasant aromas associated with the traditional outhouse.

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A group of 14 U.S. companies has reportedly formed a coalition that is seeking $1 billion in federal funds to help them make new kinds of batteries for electric cars.

Calling themselves the National Alliance for Advanced Transportation Battery Cell Manufacture, the group includes industry giants like 3M Corp. (NYSE:MMM) and Johnson Controls Inc. (NYSE:JCI), as well as Bay Area startups Envia Systems Inc. of Hayward and Mobius Power Inc. of Fremont.

Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the group is setting itself up like Sematech, the government and industry funded group that helped the U.S. chip industry regain its competitiveness two decades ago.

It seeks to build the first large-scale plant in the U.S. to build lithium-ion batteries which are seen as the next technological step for use in plug-in electric cars. The market for current electric car batteries is dominated by Asian companies and that part of the world is also considered to have the lead in developing lithium-ion batteries today.

Source: http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2008/12/15/daily57.html

The Center for Community Alternatives focuses on consulting, research, education and training services in the following areas:

• Renewable energy production including solar, wind, biomass & micro-hydro
• energy efficient buildings