Burying millions of tons of human poop
Because Microsoft will generate so much electricity to power its data centers over the next five years, its plans to become carbon negative focus on buying carbon removal credits. (Apple and others are doing the same thing.)
Its latest carbon removal investment sounds more like something you’d hear from a late-night standup comic rather than from a staid, nearly $4 trillion company. It’s made a deal with a company called Vaulted Deep to bury 4.9 million tons of biowaste slurry 5,000 feet underground. The slurry includes human waste from sewage systems, manure from farms, and sludge from paper mills.
Vaulted Deep collects the slop from industrial sites and municipalities. Burying it deep underground stops it from decomposing, so greenhouse gases, including CO2 and methane, aren’t released into the atmosphere. Vaulted Deep sells these credits to companies that want to offset their carbon emissions.
This story originally appeared on Computerworld
