The city of Berlin announced plans for a large-scale urban dog waste composting pilot program to deal with the growing health hazard posed by lazy dog owners who refuse to clean up after their pets, the online newspaper The Local reported.

According to the Berlin Animal Protection Agency, the city is home to at least 107,000 pooches. The average dog produces some 274 pounds of waste each year – which means that city sidewalks and parks are burdened with almost 30 million pounds of canine crap annually.

“It’s a menace and a health hazard,” Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development spokesperson Edeltraud Schauffel told The Local on Wednesday. “It’s sad that people don’t take more pride in their city, but we hope that the new program will motivate people to make a difference in their urban environment.”

It is technically illegal not to bag Fido’s faeces in German cities, but notoriously poor Berlin just hasn’t had the resources to enforce fines – much less hire poop scoopers to maintain public areas, Schauffel said.

But now the city has teamed funds from dog ownership taxes and the Transportation Department to come up with a unique strategy to clean city streets of both dog waste and smog – the composted pooch poo will be converted to bio fuel to power new eco-friendly buses built by Daimler.

Poo Power Berlin

The program, called “Poo Power Berlin,” will begin in three of Berlin’s largest parks, the Tiergarten, Volkspark Friedrichshain and Treptower Park.

City workers will place compost bins around the parks, complete with biodegradable balsa wood spades for picking up the Hundescheisse. The bins contain environmentally friendly chemical that will break down the waste into a sludge that will be periodically transported to bio fuel processing facilities in the city's Marzahn district.

“There is some concern that the bio fuel will emit an unpleasant exhaust smell from the new buses,” Schauffel said. “No one has ever attempted such an ambitious bio fuel project before, but we’re confident we can make it work.”

If the project is successful after one year, the city plans to place the bins in a grid network across the city by 2012.

“Who knows? Maybe one day all of the city’s movements will be powered by dog waste,” Schauffler said.

The Local