Elemento-pee
I have been mulling over this whole sustainability thing over in my head for the last couple of weeks and I'm convinced that my role as a designer and building product specifier grant me an opportunity to be part of the solution rather than the root of the problem. I am positive that I can commit to sensible development and building practices while at the same time keep a roof over my head. This is a new direction for me gang and its novelty has been driving my entries in this blog of late. Eventually, I'll get back to pimping shiny objects. In the meantime though, I have a couple more things to think about the topic of sustainability.
My Road to Damascus second become made viable with the aid of the fantastic weblog, Treehugger.Com (http://www.Treehugger.Com/). Treehugger does a amazing activity of marginalizing the lunatics who belong at the margins and bringing sustainable ideas into to mainstream. All the whilst keeping a humorousness and a laugh it really is lacking from most environmentalist screeds. Check them out.
There became an access on their website online nowadays approximately pee. Since I waxed so eloquently approximately poop elimination in my remaining access, I thought I should supply appropriate ole number one some equal time.
The recent locating approximately prescribed drugs in faucet water elements may be blamed quite solidly at the fact that most of the medicine humans ingest are excreted inside hours. If we, as a society, observed some thing to do with urine apart from flushing it; there wouldn't be hint amounts of ibuprofen and progesterone to your drinking water.
In Switzerland, The Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology has been grappling with this what-to-do-with-pee predicament and got here up with the subsequent:
In New York this week, there's an exhibition at an art gallery called Eyebeam (http://www.eyebeam.org/) called drinkpeedrinkpeedrinkpee, It's provocative title is there to generate interest of course, but the purpose of the exhibit is to illustrate urine's role in the water cycle. It's not gross, so lighten up. Anyhow, one of the goodies in the goody bag at the door is a DIY kit to make fertilizer from your very own urine. Imagine! Get the nitrogen and phosphorous from urine out of sewer water discharges and it will end red tide in the Gulf of Mexico.
Hey, the Romans used it as laundry detergent.
While urine accounts for less than 1% of total waste water extent, itcontains 50?Eighty% of all of the nutrients in waste water. Many micropollutants, i.E.Residues of pharmaceuticals and hormones from human metabolism, additionally enterwaste water thru urine. On average, for all medicines and hormones ingested,60?70% of the lively aspect is excreted in the urine. 85-ninety% of the nitrogen and 50-eighty% of the phosphorus are focused in the urine. These nutrients are suitable in agriculture, however no longer in water bodies. It may also consequently make experience to separate urine from waste water and use it for fertilizer manufacturing.