Peecycling: could donating your urine to farmers help feed the world?-Thanks to the war in Ukraine, there is a shortage of agricultural chemicals. As each adult produces enough pee annually to fertilise 145kg of wheat, perhaps bodily waste is the answer

Guardian ^

[SJackson]

Name: Peecycling.

Age: As a term, dates to about 2006; as a practice, centuries old.

Appearance: All yellow.

If this is about peeing while riding a bicycle, I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work. This is about saving and storing your urine.

Why would I want to do that? So the CIA can’t get it? So that it can be recycled.

Recycled as what? Fertiliser. Human urine is a rich source of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. According to the Rich Earth Institute of Vermont, the urine one adult produces in a year – 125 US gallons (473 litres) – is sufficient to grow 320lbs (145kg) of wheat.

That’s a lot of wheat. And pee. Making it an especially welcome idea at a time when industrially produced fertiliser is expensive and in short supply, thanks to sanctions against Russia, where a lot of it comes from.

If I can use my pee to humiliate Putin, then that weird dream I had last week will sort of come true. What’s more, those same nutrients, when flushed into wastewater systems, become contaminants responsible for creating environmentally damaging algal blooms.

So by saving my pee I could help the environment, thwart Russian aggression and produce urine-rich bread? You’d also save about 4,000 US gallons (15,000 litres) of potable water annually, according to the Rich Earth Institute.

Let’s say I wanted to give my urine to a farmer. How would I go about that? If you live in Vermont, you can donate it by the jug. The foundation supplies free funnels and has a collection depot in Brattleboro. It can be “a little sloshy” at first, peecycler Kate Lucy told the New York Times, but you get used to it.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Have you calculated how many jugs of urine would be required to replace the 200 million metric tons of fertilizer used worldwide each year?

[gleeaikin]

I am NOT suggesting replacement. I am suggesting supplementing what we can hope will be a temporary short supply, or free fertilizer for small producers like several who commented here.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

And I am pointing out it is like peeing into the ocean.

[gleeaikin]

I imagine lots of small growers in Russia use their available human waste if they are lucky enough to control a piece of land. Doing this just like their friends in North Kores, and as the South Koreans were doing while my late husband was fighting there 70 years ago. Waste not, want not.

[ought-six]

In Mexico they use human feces as fertilizer, as well.

[PIF]

My Chinese Parents Use Pee and S*** To Grow Food https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBHomLLquJk

[E. Pluribus Unum]

This is the same mentality that gave us “end fossil fuels.”

All the batteries in the world, fully charged, would power the global grid for precisely eleven seconds.

Peeing in jugs is not going to prevent the coming worldwide famine.