Hasta La Ideas

A few years ago, architecture firm MADLAB created quite a stir with their Bacterioptica chandelier, above, where illumination from the fiber optic cables is filtered through petri dishes filled with living bacteria. It’s weird and it’s beautiful. But in the future, we may put bacteria to more practical purposes. Using bio-design, we can harness bacteria to convert our waste products into clean, renewable energy.

The way we would do that is by creating microbial fuel cells, or MFCs. An MFC is basically two electrodes separated by an ion exchange membrane. We encourage bacteria to grow on the anode side (the side that generates the electrical current). As part of their metabolic process, bacteria convert organic waste into CO2, protons and electrons. Now we’ve got juice.

So what are the applications? Consider wastewater from a typical urban area. Such wastewater is known to hold nine times the energy that treatment plants use to clean it. MFCs could clean the waste while storing the energy given off by that process, creating a self-sustaining system. Scientists are currently working on making MFCs as efficient as possible, and if they can successfully scale-up that process, we could gain considerable energy from all kinds of organic waste.

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