Alchemists turn straw and excrement into pure gold.

This is no fairy tale. Today we are discussing a very special, perhaps even controversial topic. Since the Middle Ages, people have been wondering how to turn shit into gold. There have been plenty of stories about this, and these have been passed down to us in fairy tales. We in Monchique, but also elsewhere in Portugal, eat a lot of meat. Pork ranks first, closely followed by chicken. As a result, some communities have more pigs and chickens than people. The difference between pigs, chickens and humans is that humans can think freely, while pigs and chickens have to live confined in factory farms. The animals are fattened with Brazilian and American soya meal and then eventually slaughtered in the abattoir and processed into meat, ham and sausages. It’s a good thing I prefer vegetarian cuisine. But, during the pig and chicken fattening period, several litres of slurry and several kilograms of faeces are produced per animal every day, as is also the case with humans, incidentally. We humans in Monchique now use a sewage treatment plant from the water supplier Águas do Algarve in Portimão to dispose of our excrement. The farming families in Monchique have so far found little use for this liquid and solid waste from intensive pig farming. These are waste materials that should actually be disposed of in a sewage treatment plant. However, no such plant exists in Monchique (yet).

As mentioned earlier, there are some clever minds in Europe who studied biology, chemistry and physics, if not mathematics, at school and later at university in order to find an answer to the question of how to turn shit into gold. EnviTec, a company in northern Germany, is one such company where a number of intelligent people have come together and, with 81 silo plants in Germany and another eight plants in France, Spain, the USA, and soon also in the Philippines, are converting animal excrement and slurry into biofuels. Just a few days ago, a German shipping company decided to fuel its Baltic Sea ferries from Germany to Sweden, etc., with converted manure, i.e. biofuels, thereby eliminating CO₂ emissions into the environment. Anyone who looks into this topic will be amazed. A medium-sized public limited company with less than a thousand employees, an annual turnover of €337 million and a profit of €40 million is turning sweat into gold and doing so in an environmentally friendly way. So, if pig manure can be used to produce biogas, then it can certainly be used to produce electricity, which opens up a whole new perspective on making money for many farmers… Problem solved, right? Folks, you no longer need to discharge shit into the environment for free; you can actually earn money from it. You just need to know how. The solution is within sight.