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janrinok writes:

Those ever-resourceful engineers and scientist at NASA are looking at ways of generating power from urine. An article from ScienceMag explains how:

Urine is typically considered something to get rid of. But urine is largely water, and that's a valuable resource in space. If a new process can be successfully scaled up from recent lab tests, future space travelers could more efficiently recycle their own urine to reclaim its water and make a little electrical power to boot.

Getting water and other supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) is expensive. It costs about $33,000 per kilogram to launch materials into low-Earth orbit, says Eduardo Nicolau, an analytical chemist at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Launching them higher is even more costly. Resupplying spaceships carrying people far outside Earth's orbit to Mars, say probably would be prohibitively expensive even if possible.

Thus, Nicolau says, crews of long-term space missions will have to recycle their water. And the biggest source of that water is their own urine. Each astronaut on such a mission will likely produce more than 1.5 liters each day, accounting for more than 81% of the spacecraft's wastewater, Nicolau estimates. Right now, astronauts on board the ISS filter wastewater and then distill it to recover pure water, says Layne Carter, a systems engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, who is in charge of the space station's water systems (and who is not involved in the new study). Current processes, he notes, recover only 75% of the water from urine. But with efforts now under way, NASA engineers hope to increase that percentage to 85% next year and then to nearly 100%.

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

The world's first bio-brick grown from human urine has been unveiled by University of Cape Town (UCT) master's student in civil engineering Suzanne Lambert, signalling an innovative paradigm shift in waste recovery.

The bio-bricks are created through a natural process called microbial carbonate precipitation. It's not unlike the way seashells are formed, said Lambert's supervisor Dr. Dyllon Randall, a senior lecturer in water quality engineering.

In this case, loose sand is colonised with bacteria that produce urease. An enzyme, the urease breaks down the urea in urine while producing calcium carbonate through a complex chemical reaction. This cements the sand into any shape, whether it's a solid column, or now, for the first time, a rectangular building brick.

If you're been looking for more uses for pee, you're in luck.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The [housing] modules that the major space agencies plan to erect on the moon could incorporate an element contributed by the human colonizers themselves: the urea in their pee. European researchers have found that it could be used as a plasticizer for concrete used to build structures.

[...] Transporting about 0.45 kg (1 pound) from the Earth to space costs about $10,000, which means that building a complete lunar module in this way would be very expensive. This is the reason that space agencies are thinking of using raw materials from the moon's surface—or even those that astronauts themselves can provide, such as their urine.

Scientists from Norway, Spain, the Netherlands and Italy, in cooperation with ESA, have conducted several experiments to verify the potential of urea as a plasticizer, an additive that can be incorporated into concrete to soften the initial mixture and make it more pliable before it hardens. Details are published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

"To make geopolymer concrete that will be used on the moon, the idea is to use what is already there: regolith (loose material from the moon's surface) and the water from the ice present in some areas," explains one of the authors, Ramón Pamies, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (Murcia), where various analyses of the samples have been carried out using X-ray diffraction. "But moreover, with this study, we have seen that a waste product, such as the urine of the personnel who occupy the moon bases, could also be used. The two main components of urine are water and urea, a molecule that allows the hydrogen bonds to be broken and, therefore, reduces the viscosities of many aqueous mixtures."

Using a material similar to moon regolith developed by ESA, together with urea and various plasticizers, the researchers manufactured various concrete cylinders using a 3-D printer and compared the results.

The experiments [...] revealed that the samples made with urea supported heavy weights and remained almost stable in shape. Their resistance was also tested at a temperature 80°C; it was found to increase even after eight freeze-thaw cycles like those on the moon.

Journal Reference:
Shima Pilehvar et al. Utilization of urea as an accessible superplasticizer on the moon for lunar geopolymer mixtures, Journal of Cleaner Production (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.119177

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Testing the use of human urine as a natural fertilizer for crops:

Humans have known for thousands of years that their urine is an excellent fertilizer for crops. It contains phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium—many of the same ingredients as commercial fertilizers. But because of the squeamishness associated with using urine to grow crops, its use has been limited. [...]

The first step in the experiment involved renaming urine because its common name was considered offensive. They settled on Oga. Next, they separated the farmers into two groups; one ran their farms in the traditional way, the other fertilized their wheat using Oga. Over two growing seasons, crop yields were measured for both groups. The Oga for the second group of 27 farmers was provided by the farmers themselves, who were taught how to pasteurize, store and dilute their urine for use as fertilizer. They also added small amounts of animal manure.

The data collected from the farms showed that those that had been fertilized using Oga produced on average 30% more grain than the traditional farms. The researchers note that the differences were so great that other women in the region began emulating those in the experiment. Two years after the experiment, they found that more than a thousand women farmers were using Oga to fertilize their crops.

Journal Reference:
Moussa, Hannatou O., Nwankwo, Charles I., Aminou, Ali M., et al. Sanitized human urine (Oga) as a fertilizer auto-innovation from women farmers in Niger [open], Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s13593-021-00675-2

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Urine has lots of nitrogen and phosphorus—a problem as waste, great as fertilizer:

Removing urine from wastewater and using it as fertilizer has the potential to decrease nutrient loading in water bodies and boost sustainability by making use of a common waste material.

In excess, nitrogen and phosphorus in our waste streams can stimulate algal blooms and create conditions dangerous to marine and lake ecosystems and human health. According to the website of the Rich Earth Institute, a Vermont-based company focused on using human waste as a resource, most of the nitrogen and phosphorus in wastewater comes from human urine, even though it makes up only 1 percent of wastewater. Removing urine could remove 75 percent of the nitrogen and 55 percent of the phosphorus from municipal wastewater treatment plants. And those nutrients could then be recycled for use as fertilizer.

[...] If it can be separated, urine can act to partly sterilize itself. The nitrogen in urine leaves the body as urea, a simple organic compound. Bacteria in pipes typically break down urea into ammonia. When urine is sitting in a container, the ammonia raises the pH of the solution to about eight or nine. The high pH environment kills any pathogens from the body that might have entered the urine, Vinnerås said.

“It’s like a Twinkie,” Noe-Hays said, referring to urine’s long shelf-life.