Given the right conditions, giraffe feces ferment like a fine wine.

Every year, the Toronto Zoo’s animals produce 3,000 tonnes of unpleasantness, which is trucked out to a compost site where it slowly decomposes.

By the early months of 2012, however, the ZooShare Biogas Cooperative plant will turn that pile of poop into saleable energy, heat and fertilizer.

In June, the zoo’s board of management entered into an agreement with the co-op. Construction will soon begin at the old compost site. Once fully functional, the plant is expected to produce 4 million kilowatt hours a year, which is enough energy to power 350 homes every day, for a year.

The bison herd and the rhinos will make prolific contributions to the province’s power grid, said Dr. William Rapley, the zoo’s director of conservation, education and wildlife.

Nothing will change in the current waste retrieval system, but some species will have to be excluded. Bird droppings, for one, are just too difficult to collect, said Rapley.

“Perhaps some of the primates might be problematic ... (because of the) nature of their stool content, and handling it,” he said.

When you harness the power of poop, you access the food energy the body is not able to digest. The zoo will deliver animal waste three times a week. Small amounts will be pumped into the “digester” at 20-minute intervals, 24 hours a day.

It’s an anaerobic process, which means that with very little oxygen, the bacteria and the waste will ferment “like making wine or beer,” said Christine Koenig, a consultant and founding member of the co-op that will operate the plant.

The bacteria and the manure will “produce little farts” of methane that will rise to the top of the digester, where the gas will be captured and burned. That energy will drive a generator, which creates more energy to be sold back to the grid under the province’s feed-in-tariff program for 16 cents per kilowatt hour.

The extra heat from the process may be used in a greenhouse, liquid waste may benefit local farms and solid waste will be resold as fertilizer.

The zoo will still buy its electricity from the grid, but will share in profits from fertilizer sales.

The waste from the animals will be 25 per cent of the mixture. Food waste from a large, unnamed grocery retailer will make up the rest.

Koenig said the type of feces is important – some animals, like horses, are very good digesters, so their waste doesn’t have much energy left. Cows and pigs are less efficient and have better stool to harvest.

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Sales of shares in the community-owned cooperative that will operate the plan will soon be available to fund the $5.4 million project.

Once it is operational, educational tours of the facility are expected as another crappy spinoff.