PEE POWER!

I have written before about the urine powered batteries in Japan. In a recent article on TreeHugger, they talked about pee as fertilizer. We are clearly wasting our waste. They bring up the points of how our pee regardless of our sewage system does find its contents in our drinking water eventually. Things such as antibiotics, birth control, and viagra are tainting our own organic systems. Gothenburg researcher Zsofia Ganrot has come up with an awesome new method of powdering pee which also removes traces of pharmaceuticals. She has figured out how to recover nutrients by freezing–thawing human urine in combination with struvite precipitation and nitrogen adsorption on zeolite. Shes pretty amazing. Zsofia did her PHD on ”Urine processing for efficient nutrient recovery and reuse in agriculture”. The Treehugger article continues to point out how much we PEE a year. Quite a good bit! Each one of us contributes about 7-9 liters of urine a week to sanitary systems for all those pissing in porcelain. According to Ganrot, in Sweden alone the collection of this resource could offset 1/5th the country's fertilizer use and reduce pollution from the transport of liquid fertilizer. Brilliant! It's recycling the noise into the system!

Pee is a valuable resource which we just throw out everyday. Urine therapy has been around since the Romans and then before. In 1978, the former Prime Minister of India, Morarji Desai, a longtime practitioner of urine therapy spoke to Dan Rather on 60 Minutes about urine therapy. Desai stated that urine therapy was the perfect medical solution for the millions of Indians who cannot afford medical treatment. How could we actually process the urine and make it into something that could sustain us?

Or for a bigger stretch, what if we could pay for things with pee one day? It would be more of a barter system, but if we can sell our eggs and organs, why not our potential energies? I mean the dollar isn't worth the paper its printed on most days now so .. how bout something that's more "physical"? ENERGY IS THE ANSWER.

Metabolism= Peeeece of mind

Scientists in Singapore have developed a battery powered by urine. Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology created the credit card-size battery as a disposable power source for medical test kits. Ki Bang Lee and his colleagues have designed a disposable battery on a chip that is activated by biofluids, aka urine, blood, and potentially even semen. All this stuff in our bodies is potential energy! All these fluids contains ions which allow the electricity-producing chemical reaction to take place in the battery.

This potentially low-cost biodegradable battery is not that complex to fabricate. Lee and his colleagues soaked a piece of paper in a solution of copper chloride and sandwiched it between strips of magnesium and copper. This sandwich was then laminated between two sheets of transparent plastic. When a drop of urine is added to the paper through a slit in the plastic, a chemical reaction takes place that produces electricity. (Electrici-pee!)

This little prototype battery produced about 1.5 volts, the same as a standard AA battery, and runs for about 90 minutes. Researchers said the power, voltage, and lifetime of the battery can be improved by adjusting the geometry and materials used. This technoloy can be used to power laptops, mp3 players, lightbulbs, whatever potentially! imagine all the energy that has been wasted! No more black outs in NYC! Everybody Pee!