CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – It stinks and it’s a hazard to walkers everywhere, but it turns out dog poop has a bright side.

Dog poop is lighting a lantern at a Cambridge dog park as part of a monthslong project that its creator, artist Matthew Mazzotta, hopes will get people thinking about not wasting waste.

Additional Photos

Louisa Solano visits a dog park in Cambridge with her pet Macedo, left. The tank behind them is part of a system that turns dog waste into fuel for powering a gas lantern, center rear. The Associated Press

The “Park Spark” poop converter is actually two steel, 500-gallon oil tanks painted a golden yellow, connected by diagonal black piping and attached to an old gaslight-style street lantern at the Pacific Street Park.

After the dogs do their business, signs on the tanks instruct owners to use biodegradable bags supplied on site to pick up the poop and deposit it into the left tank. People then turn a wheel to stir its insides, which contain waste and water. Microbes in the waste give off methane, an odorless gas that is fed through the tanks to the lamp and burned off.

Dog owner Lindsey Leason, a 29-year-old Harvard student, said she was all for seeing poop in a new light as she watched her two dogs play at the park.

“Since I have to pick up dog poop a lot, I think I’d rather have it be useful,” Leason said.

The project was funded by a $4,000 grant from Council of the Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Mazzotta earned a master’s degree in visual studies last year.

The 33-year-old Mazzotta, who is not a dog owner, got the idea after he visited the park with a friend in 2009. Mazzotta had recently traveled to India and saw people there using poop in so-called “methane digesters” to cook food. As he watched the park’s trash can fill with bags of poop, he remarked to his friend, “In other countries, they use that.”

A similar idea to use dog poop for power was floated in San Francisco about four years ago. But that idea fizzled in the city’s bureaucracy and over concerns about safety, said environmental scientist Will Brinton, who worked with Mazzotta on Park Spark and was consulted in the San Francisco project.

Cambridge Fire Chief Gerry Reardon had his own questions about “Park Spark,” including whether vandalism or poor design could cause the tank’s insides to spill out and how the methane would be safely contained and vented. But Park Spark’s sturdy build and safety features persuaded the fire department to give its approval, he said.

“We try to stay progressive here,” Reardon said.

Brinton, president of Woods End Laboratories in Maine, which specializes in biogas energy development, said biogas from waste is a potentially major and accessible energy source, and a novel project like Mazzotta’s can highlight that.

To Mazzotta, the dog poop device helps fill a need for clean energy and better waste disposal, and all people need to do to fuel it is look around.

And watch where they step.

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