Maui County Mayor Charmaine Tavares said she wants to pursue an ambitious plan to use treated wastewater to grow algae as an alternative-energy fuel source, the Maui News reported.

Rather than continue the expensive and controversial use of injection wells — a process that pours treated wastewater back into the water table and is blamed by many for killing reefs and choking fish with algae blooms — Tavares proposed a pilot project that utilizes the nitrogen-rich byproducts of human waste.

Tavares said she wants to pursue an agenda that would eliminate the county's 18 injection wells, perhaps in 10 years.

Every day, the county's gravity-fed wells send nearly 9 million gallons of treated wastewater down steel pipes that can sink 385 feet below the surface.

"Why not just get rid of it for good?" Tavares said in interviews last weekend. "My goal is to get 100 percent diversion from injection wells countywide. We have a ways to go, but why not?"