Human waste and its Potential utility.

Now I barley passed Biology here and don't know a thing about it but is ther eabsolutely no use no scientific or medical use outside of DNA sampling for Urine, Feces, hair, sweat, tears, etc? It's been at the back of my mind for ages and I want to hear opinions on it.

I hear piss makes cruddy soap . . .

Fertilizer? Wikipedia lists lots of uses for urine.

edited 23rd Mar '11 8:51:53 PM by QQQQQ

So we have one though that's pretty obvious i'm talking about the fact that human waste has quite a few mineral resources and chemical resources. Why are we not using it more effectively?

Let's recycle it using advanced suits.

Never need to eat again!

Seriously, the mineral count varies from poo to poo and there's no good way to separate the crap from the good stuff yet.

edited 23rd Mar '11 8:52:17 PM by Usht

I say toilet companies and swage companies need to work together to actually make an effort to collect the waste isntead of just letting it be lost.

Um... Was the Pun intended?

edited 23rd Mar '11 8:53:19 PM by tnu1138

It's a topic about poop. Do you think I'd pass up that opportunity?

Anyway, the problem is that the way poop is made, it's very difficult, time consuming, and energy intensive to get out some relatively minor amounts of minerals. Thus why if poop does get reused, it's usually as fertilizer, because nature breaks it down better.

What about Urine and sweat? Tears?

Mainly made out of water and salts. Urine could technically be sterilized and used for non-food purposes if you can get people to have separate tools for flushing that stuff away. Sweat, just how do you expect to collect that? Same goes for tears.

Ok you have a valid point there. Then again it could redefine the meaning of Sweatshops.

edited 23rd Mar '11 9:05:51 PM by tnu1138

That's still be horribly inefficient to do since sweat is meant to stick to humans' skin and we aren't exactly towels to be squeezed.

Um, urine is already sterile. Just saying.

• composting toilets — throw in compost with fecal matter and you eventually have fertilizer. Just don't pee in the toilet. Please.
• aged urine's been used as a cleaning agent since antiquity.
  • skins were also soaked in urine as part of the tanning process.

edited 23rd Mar '11 9:37:06 PM by annebeeche

It's sterile inside your body. Once it makes contact with the outside world, then the soup of stuff in it starts reacting with common bacteria in the air and water making it very unsanitary. As in, water doesn't react the way it does.

edited 23rd Mar '11 9:35:28 PM by Usht

Okay, makes sense to me.

Well, we are running out of water, so eventually it may eventually prove cost effective to filter are our urine to save water.

Off the top of my head? Let's see fecal matter is commonly extracted and used to farm methane for a while and then the results are scraped together, boiled to kill any remaining parasites, and then sold as fertilizer. I think they can pull something out of urine if they've isolated it enough, but I can't remember what, and I don't think the value of it balanced out with laying a second layer of drain pipes. I think hair can be thrown in with the fecal matter, as can most biological waste products.

Well I know I'd let, and quite enjoy, a hot chick piss on me.

But as for uses, you'll have to ask someone more sober. But feces does make good fertilizer, I'm told.

edited 23rd Mar '11 11:36:57 PM by MarkVonLewis

IIRC the Romans used to use urine as part of the dyeing (dying?) process and the first phosphorus was extracted from urine

Urine is where a lot of excess nitrogen ends up, and nitrogen is one of the major limiting nutrients for a lot of agricultural systems, so fertiliser is of course the big one.

I've heard that before, that they used it to fix dye.

Depending on the diet, feces is mainly indigestible plant fibre. I'm not sure what you could use that for except, possibly, fuel for fires.

I know they used to make leather with piss, but we've got better material now.

In Sweden they're experimenting with toilets that can extract phosphorus from urine. We're actually in danger of running out of natural sources of phosphorus since we use it way too much as a fertilizer and it gets washed out into the sea where it's nearly impossible to get back (and it also causes increased algae blooms since it's a fertilizer and all, but that's a different matter).