Urine-to-Fertilizer kit
drinkpeedrinkpeedrinkpee is an art installation based on converting urine into houseplant fertilizer or even drinking water. Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray created it last year and offered a Urine-to-Fertilizer DIY Kit. From their project page:
We all think of human pee as gross and something that ought to be vigorously “cleaned up” or sanitized. However, human urine is actually sterile (unlike faeces, urine is bacteria-free). This liquid by product of our daily lives can be a rich food source if it gets into the RIGHT part of the right ecosystem. Now, most human urine travels untreated into the waterways and is a significant cause of eutrophication, a toxic condition caused by harmful algae blooms, in the oceans. The excess Nitrogen and Phosphorus in our urine overfeeds algae (like Red Tide) and effectively suffocates fish. However, a pioneering biological waste treament process being used in Switzerland can extract this phosphorus & nitrogen for use as a fertilizer, leaving the rest of urine almost harmless to aquatic life. This kit gives users the opportunity to replicate the new technique at home and fertilize their plants with their own pee.drinkpeedrinkpeedrinkpee Urine to Fertilizer Kit (Thanks, Gareth Branwyn!)
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link bad cannot go drinkpeedrinkpee, not that I really wanted to, but the concept is cool
a "pioneering biological waste treament process being used in Switzerland" - heh!
I guess peeing on the compost heap is kind of rustic, "pioneer style" as it were.
I'm not sure how the "kit" they're refering to could outperform the old "peeing in the watering can" technique...
Or you try not to pee within 300 meters of a drinking water reservoir...
Dont drink from where you pee...
That being said of course urine is a good fertilizer - if you can keep the salts in it from salting your earth then its not much more than ammonia and phosphorous. Two great fertilizers - provided they don't burn your lawn because of concentration.
Sorry - just peein on the grass wont work. I know - i spent an entire summer with no running water.
walking all the way to an outhouse in the middle of the night is crazy. Thats just asking for trouble when you are working in solitary conditions... You pee off your deck, or into the sink in your cabin. And you crap before it gets dark out...
treating it is one option - building a urinal or peeing in the bush is another.
Is fertilizer really that expensive? It would seem to me that to gather and treat urine would be the piss. Cheaper to make a solution of household ammonia and spoiled beer. Mix it together with enough water that it wont burn your soil.
AND you don't have to save your pee like some weird antisocial cult leader...
Just use your compost bucket as a chamber pot.
That's my patented high-tech solution.
If you use urine without processing it you are basically salting your soil at a very slow pace. A lot of it may leach out with rain, but still - salt and gardening just dont work.
use a urinal and just toss a bit of ammonia cleaner into your next watering cycle.
Why do people seem to think that fiddling with and saving their pee is a good idea? Its undoubtedly more expensive to gather urine and process it than to toss 3 or 4 kitchen cleaners or ingredients into your next batch of plant water.
re, mikefinch:
It's not about saving money or time, it's about saving materials and energy. The site is down currently, so I can't post any sort of real opinion on the matter - but presumably one would investigate the idea and find out if that kind of effort really does enhance our chance to preserve the environment.
when i was younger my grandma would ask my brothers to take a leak in a little plastic tub next to the toilet and she'd use that to water our huge garden. :3
Link:
http://www.submersibledesign.com/drinkpee/
I like the fact that one of them is named "Britta". Guerrilla marketing effort? (I know, there is an extra 't').
"human urine is actually sterile"
This has been discredited. Although it is technically true that urine is sterile while in the bladder, it becomes contaminated as it moves through the body and is expelled. Considering the high rates of STIs, I wouldn't want to drink any urine straight from the tap so to speak.
Fixed the link! Thanks!
"Considering the high rates of STIs, I wouldn't want to drink any urine straight from the tap so to speak."
it depends on how much your paying for that sex...
You gotta get that "Bang" for your buck...
Sorry, I can't resist...
Libraryboi, there are plenty of us who are have no phobias at all when it comes to peoples' taps (whichever variety you prefer).
Whether or not you drink the pee that comes out of them is kind of a moot point.
Also, Urine therapy (internal and external) has been around for millennia.
Two common sense discussions about the sterility of urine by people who profess (on the internet) to be doctors:
http://www.medhelp.org/forums/urology/archive/1382.html
http://yarchive.net/med/urine_sterility.html
The second one has a couple lulz in it as well. YMMV
@mikefinch
Commercial ammonia is (mostly) produced from Natural Gas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia#Synthesis_and_production
Our current fertilizer model is based on converting stored energy, ie. natural gas, into fertilizer.
Capturing the fertilizer out of urine lowers the bad effects of urine in the environment, and improves the plants...
During the Civil War the south was running short of Potassium Nitrate with which to make gun powder. Households were instructed to save their "chamber lye" (aka urine) so that the vital chemical could be recovered from same.
A northern wit naturally did a song about it when word got out.
That illustration on the right of the skinned human drinking and peeing? Worst piece of marketing ever. And I'm all for ways to repurpose waste!
1) I don't see how this is sustainable, with the one-time-use chemicals needed by this process. And what do you do with all the container bottles that comes in the kit?
2) My family is bound to be less than enthusiastic when it comes to step 3 ... place urine in fridge for 1.5 hours ...
night soil - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil
and I can't find the link, but I swear SFU had an experiment where they used snow making machines to process excrement. I vaguely recall them saying the process sterilized the crap. Brings to mind all sorts of applications
This is the problem with the green movement - they have no problem spending more money on half baked greenwashed ideas, than they ever would on just cleaning up after themselves.
you can talk about resources and not using petrochemicals but lets be realistic:
How much time and energy is going into the manufacture and delivery of these products?
Keep in mind that the glass required heat to be forged, and that cardboard uses bleaches and peroxides in its production. These products are often treated and re-released into water supplies. Magnesium chloride must be mined or extacted from water, both are labour intensive jobs.
-Now, consider that ammonia can be synthesised using any source of hydrogen (hydrocarbons are cheap and hydrogen rich) - electrolysis of water for instance...
-Consider that ammonia is a commonly distributed product.
-Consider that the pee kit is a one time use product that generates ONE gallon of fertilizer.
-Consider the effort of monitoring your urine in some chemical reaction rather than tossing something from under your sink into your plant water...
Sure it SEEMS like a good idea, It might even seem like an ok idea as an "experiment" - Your still giving mother nature the finger.
This is green wash. And its why the environmental movement can go to hell.
And what the hell is this about "urines effect on the environment"? Do you not have waste treatment facilities in your town? Or do you live in India?
Anyone worth their salt will tell you not to pee near your water supply - If you dont have a sewer, or a latrine then choose a spot some distance from the water. You will destroy a small section of ground, but the urine will not be able to contaminate your water.
Western cities usually have waste treatment. Not to mention that eutrophication is mostly caused by detergents and poor farming practices. Not from human waste.
Once again - the environmental movement is less about the earth and more about patting yourself on the back.
I use urine on my houseplants, diluted about 15 to one.
Every once in a while, they get to go out and get a good flushing, either with rain, or a big bucket of water.
Urine by itself is pretty hot, but it's the amount of nitrogen not the salt (which is already pretty low, your kidneys can't concentrate salt that much, your sweat is a lot saltier) which especially when diluted, is really pretty insignificant.
Is this really true in the US? In this part of Europe, discharge of sewage into waterways is extremely tightly controlled, and most eutrophication is due to runoff from agriculture.
Anyone using urine as a fertilizer should be aware that large proportions of the nitrogen in the urine can be lost to the air by ammonia volatilisation. There's been lots of work done on this due to its importance in loss of soil fertility on grazing land.
@# 21 and 23-
I work on this issue for a living at the EPA, so let me expand on this a bit.
The majority of wastewater treatment facilities around the world, including the US, were designed to remove faeces and bacteria from water, but the urine essentially passes through. Most of the nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) in human waste are contained in the urine.
So yes, wastewater treatment facilities are a significant source of nitrogen and phosphorus and they do negatively impact watersheds. Whether or not runoff from agriculture is a worse part of the problem than the flow from treatment plants is something of a red herring--they're BOTH problems, and we need to address both sides of the issue.
Current methodology is to force wastewater plants to remove nutrients, but the state of the industry is to build enormously expensive and energy and chemical intensive processes to settle out the phosphorus and turn the nitrogen from a useful fertilizer back into nitrogen gas. Because of the capital and O&M costs, treatment facilities fight tooth and nail in courts to avoid nutrient permits from environmental agencies.
In other words, urine doesn't get treated at most wastewater plants.
In the developed world, we have two problems with nutrients. The first problem is that there aren't enough nutrients on our crops, so we import fertilizer. The second problem is that we have too many nutrients in our waterways (from runoff from fertilizer and from wastewater plants), so we force the wastewater plants to destroy these nutrients at great expense even though they're the EXACT SAME compounds that farmers just down the street are paying good money to put on their crops.
Lots of people have seen the folly in this approach and are trying to figure out how to close the loop. One method is to recovery the nutrients from wastewater as struvite by adding magnesium at a particular point in the process. It's not a bad idea, but it would make a lot more sense to capture urine at the source and keep all those nutrients out of our sewers in the first place. You can do this with urine-diverting toilets and waterless urinals, and it's been done on a large scale in Sweden for some time. In the end, we'll probably end up doing both--new developments will have urine capture, and wastewater treatment plants will move to nutrient capture and reuse instead of expensive nutrient removal.
So to sum up: recycling urine as a fertilizer is a perfectly plausible idea with both environmental and economic benefits going for it.
This product, on the other hand, looks to be a bunch of bunk, the work of a soulless hack trying to capitalize on well-meaning but uninformed treehuggers. As a number of other posters have commented, if you have a compost bed you should just pee on it once in a while, or you can dilute your pee with water.
More resources:
Excellent op-ed from the NYT by Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/opinion/27george.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=urine&st=cse&scp=1
A guy who's spent 20 years trying to get us to stop pissing in the rivers: http://www.petermaier.net/
A paper on the energy implications of nutrient removal if we start collecting urine and treating it separately: http://www.iwaponline.com/wst/04801/0103/048010103.pdf