Cow poop and chicken droppings" You might not expect to find those among the fuel sources automakers are tinkering with. But BMW is among a number of automakers harnessing the power of biowaste?not to power its cars, but the factories that build them.
The Bavarian carmaker’s Rosslyn factory near Pretoria, South Africa, gets about a quarter of its electricity from a nearby biogas plant and has for over two years now. The waste comes from area cattle farms, chicken coops, and the three million residents of greater Tshwane. (Never heard of it" It’s Pretoria’s metropolitan region, and it has about the population of the city of Chicago in an area ten times as large.)
Here in the United States, BMW’s plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, draws even more of its power from methane gas, piped in from a landfill about 10 miles away. Two on-site turbines generate nearly half of the factory’s energy requirements, reducing its footprint by 92,000 tons of CO2 (and its electric bill by $3.5 million) each year. A Different Kind of Eco-Rivalry
The EPA ranks the Spartanburg plant among the 10 greenest on-site power-generation facilities in the United States?ahead of GM’s biogas station in Warren, Michigan, and Volkswagen’s solar park in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The factory also boasts the world’s largest fleet of hydrogen-powered machinery: 350 forklifts, tuggers, and material trains humming around the body shops, paint shops, and a...