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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Hawaii should go from
HPOWER to H-POO-ERA reader writes: "Visitors come from around the world, stay in our hotels, eat in our restaurants and leave their poo. This poo impacts all the taxpayers and has overwhelmed our City and County folks. Our poo system cannot handle the deluge. On top of that problem, we have the highest electricity cost in the world."
I found this information fascinating, first, because I had no idea that City and County employees were being overwhelmed by poo, and second, because I had no idea what poo was. I thought maybe the correspondent was using a Hawaiian word and had merely left out an okina or one of those quotation mark thingies. But I could find no po'o, p'oo or p'o'o in my Hawaiian dictionary.
Then I noticed the reader had attached a newspaper story from England and that "poo" is actually the British word for excrement. (Once I understood that, I became even more alarmed for our public workers.)
The newspaper story reports that London's Science Museum has decided to create electricity by using what is described in a very non-museum lingo as "visitors poo."
In other words, the plan is to take the bodily waste of museum visitors -- not physically against their will, of course -- and burn it as fuel in a small power station to generate power for the museum.
MUSEUM HEAD, or rather, museum director Jon Tucker said poo collected from the museum's heads, or, as we say in the States, "chambers of deep thought," could power 500 light bulbs.
"With free admission it would be a great way for visitors to give something back to the museum and help keep overhead down," he said, with just a tad too much enthusiasm.
The "Honolulu Lite" reader concerned with the amount of poo generated by tourists believes Honolulu should adopt a similar "poo power"-generating scheme. He invited me to consider how many toilets are flushed daily in Waikiki, a mental exercise I refused to indulge in.
But I take his point. If the technology is there to turn poo into power, why not do it? We already convert rubbish into electrical power at the garbage-to-energy plant.
What I don't understand is why he is looking only to tourists as a source of fuel. If I were on vacation somewhere paying $300 a night for a hotel room and $10 for a watered-down drink in a weird glass with a paper umbrella, I'd feel a little exploited if they were also collecting, processing and utilizing my bodily wastes for profit.
I mean, if I'm going to contribute to the power grid, I'd expect to at least get the kamaaina room rate and a bus pass or something.
A poo-to-energy plant that uses tourist and resident poo alike would be the way to go. That would keep taxi and limo drivers from having to take heat from tourists who feel they are being exploited. (Tourist: "Tip? You want a tip? I paid my fare. I'm powering that street light over there AND you want a tip? Here's a tip: When you get home tonight and turn on your television, your dishwasher, your computer and your toaster oven, think of me.")
So, thank you to the reader for broaching this interesting, yet delicate, subject. It's not an idea to be pooh-poohed.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' 2004 First Place Award winner for humor writing, appears Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com