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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren vocal bam here. Have you ever just tossed a

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Speaker 1: nice pair of shoes after slogging around in the mud

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Speaker 1: all day at a festival, or sent a rug or

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Speaker 1: piece of upholstered furniture to the dump because a beloved

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Speaker 1: mammal in your household, be it dog, cat, or baby,

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Speaker 1: made an impressively unfixable mess of it using only their

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Speaker 1: bodily fluids. We throw valuable things away all the time

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Speaker 1: because they're disgusting and we don't know what else to

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Speaker 1: do with them. But one research team at the University

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Speaker 1: of Florida is taking a hard look at how we

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Speaker 1: deal with something that's definitely valuable but also essentially gross

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Speaker 1: our p as humans were understandably reluctant to spend a

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Speaker 1: lot of time fiddling with our own waste products. After

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Speaker 1: all our bodies through with it. It smells bad and

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Speaker 1: it could potentially make a sick We are done there,

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Speaker 1: take it away. But just because we're not particularly keen

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Speaker 1: on hanging out with our p doesn't mean it couldn't

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Speaker 1: save the world. Old urine is full of nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus,

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Speaker 1: and potassium, the same stuff we mine out of the

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Speaker 1: ground and air to make the fertilizers that we grow

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Speaker 1: our food with. We spoke with University of Florida Associate

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Speaker 1: Professor Trevor Boyer. He said the paradigm shift will be

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Speaker 1: in recognizing that wastewater has a lot of valuable products

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Speaker 1: contained within it. What we'd like to do is recover

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Speaker 1: those valuable products and put them to a beneficial use.

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Speaker 1: In most parts of the world, with municipal plumbing, urine

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Speaker 1: gets flushed to the wastewater treatment plant, along with everything

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Speaker 1: else that goes down the drain or toilet, biodegradable material,

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Speaker 1: assorted cleaning chemicals, and nutrients that are great for making

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Speaker 1: plants grow, but which can cause algae and rivers and

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Speaker 1: lakes to explode and choke up waterways. The wastewater treatment

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Speaker 1: plant removes as much of this negative stuff as possible

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Speaker 1: so that it doesn't pollute the environment. Boyer said, the

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Speaker 1: problem is wastewater is pretty useless as a coming gold stream,

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Speaker 1: but if you could separate it out, you'd be able

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Speaker 1: to recover drinking water, fertilizer, TiAl energy, and even metals

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Speaker 1: like gold and silver. The key to mining our waste

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Speaker 1: for these treasures would be in separating the waste streams

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Speaker 1: at the source. At this point, that is difficult to

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Speaker 1: do in our homes, where plumbing and appliances are set

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Speaker 1: to dump dish SuDS and urine down the same pipe. However,

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Speaker 1: Boyer's team realized it would be a lot easier at

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Speaker 1: a giant football stadium where nobody's doing laundry but a

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Speaker 1: lot of people are urinating, and right around the corner

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Speaker 1: from the lab there just happens to be a football

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Speaker 1: field with more than an acre of turf grass in

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Speaker 1: need of fertilization, affectionately known as the swamp. The University

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Speaker 1: of Florida football stadium seats nine fans during seven home

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Speaker 1: games each year. A thesis written by Boyer's student Bryce

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Speaker 1: sink Graph calculated how many times each person would use

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Speaker 1: the bathroom during one event and how much nitrogen, phosphorus,

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Speaker 1: and potassium could be harvested from that urine. They concluded

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Speaker 1: that in one football season, Gator fans would produce more

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Speaker 1: than enough nutrients to fertilize the field for that season.

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Speaker 1: Boyer said, at us point, nobody in the US is

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Speaker 1: capturing urine on site. And saving it in storage tanks

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Speaker 1: to use as fertilizer, and he says that the easiest

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Speaker 1: way to accomplish that would be to install special waterless

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Speaker 1: urinals in the men's bathrooms, which are already being used

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Speaker 1: in this country as water saving devices. After that, the

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Speaker 1: urine could be piped to storage tanks under the stadium

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Speaker 1: and held while chemistry did its magic changing the chemical

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Speaker 1: composition of the urine into a form of nitrogen usable

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Speaker 1: on grass. Although mining our waste products for valuable nutrients

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Speaker 1: may not be easy to implement overnight, Lawyer says it's

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Speaker 1: important to look at the costs and benefits of it

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Speaker 1: and how we might accomplish it. He said, the big

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Speaker 1: question is how do we make our society more sustainable.

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Speaker 1: The answer might hinge on our ability to change the

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Speaker 1: way that we think about our own p Today's episode

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Speaker 1: was written by Jesslyin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang.

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Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other Golden topics,

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Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com. M