The first unit is expected to be operational as early as July after Downie persuaded council chiefs across the UK to enter into talks on piloting his method of handling the country's most antisocial biofuel and thus reduce the £72.5 million ($132 million) spent by councils each year on sending dog waste to landfill.
Downie's interest in the project surfaced when he became fed up with pushing his baby's buggy along streets and parks covered in dog foul.
Streetkleen will take dog mess collected by local authorities from the bins dotted around the nation's parks, removing the waste from the ubiquitous plastic bags using an automated system and then passing it through to a digester tank.
Downie insists the system is odour- free and will even recycle the plastic after it has been cleaned in an industrial washer.
The biogas will then be used to power a turbine generating electricity to be sold to the National Grid, while the heat and CO2 will be fed into an adjoining commercial greenhouse to grow plants with the help of a pasteurised biofertiliser resulting from the remains of the waste.
According to its designer, the system can operate on as little as 500kg of waste a day and take up to three tonnes a day, generating 200,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, enough to power 60 homes.
Every tonne of excrement kept out of landfill will displace 450kg of greenhouse gases, and will also provide the growing medium for a rather surprising crop.
The Cheshire-based company, which has received start-up support from the Welsh Government, expects to make money by charging a fee to process each consignment of waste, along with income from feed-in tariffs for its electricity and sales from its greenhouses.
If the system proves successful, Downie is confident that other local authorities will adopt it to process Britain's costly mountain of dog waste. With nearly 800,000 dogs in the capital, London spends £9.5 million annually on sending their waste to landfill. Independent
