Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here with a classic episode from
Speaker 1: our archives. Although stadiums were shut down during the beginning
Speaker 1: of the COVID nineteen pandemic, they've been reopening, which once
Speaker 1: again raises the question, could we be doing something useful
Speaker 1: with all the p happening in those places? Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogel Bam here. Have you ever just tossed a
Speaker 1: nice pair of shoes after slogging around in the mud
Speaker 1: all day at a festival? Or the scent a rug
Speaker 1: or piece of upholstered furniture to the dump because a
Speaker 1: beloved mammal in your household, be it dog, cat, or baby,
Speaker 1: made an impressively unfixable mess of it using only their
Speaker 1: bodily fluids. We throw valuable things away all the time
Speaker 1: because they're disgusting and we don't know what else to
Speaker 1: do with them. But one research team at the University
Speaker 1: of Florida is taking a hard look at how we
Speaker 1: deal with something that's definitely valuable but also essentially gross.
Speaker 1: Our p as humans were understandably reluctant to spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time fiddling with our own waste products. After
Speaker 1: all our bodies through with it. It smells bad and
Speaker 1: it could potentially make a sick. We are done there,
Speaker 1: take it away. But just because we're not particularly keen
Speaker 1: on hanging out with our pa and doesn't mean it
Speaker 1: couldn't save the world. Urine is full of nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus,
Speaker 1: and potassium, the same stuff we mine out of the
Speaker 1: ground and air to make the fertilizers that we grow
Speaker 1: our food with. We spoke with University of Florida Associate
Speaker 1: Professor Trevor Boyer. He said the paradigm shift will be
Speaker 1: in recognizing that wastewater has a lot of valuable products
Speaker 1: contained within it. What we'd like to do is recover
Speaker 1: those valuable products and put them to a beneficial use.
Speaker 1: In most parts of the world, with municipal plumbing, urine
Speaker 1: gets flushed to the wastewater treatment plant, along with everything
Speaker 1: else that goes down the drain or toilet, biodegradable material,
Speaker 1: assorted cleaning chemicals, and nutrients that are great for making
Speaker 1: plants grow, but which can cause algae and rivers and
Speaker 1: lakes to explode and choke up waterways. The wastewater treatment
Speaker 1: plant removes as much of this negative stuff as possible
Speaker 1: so that it doesn't pollute the environment. Boyer said, the
Speaker 1: problem is, wastewater is pretty useless as a combing gold stream,
Speaker 1: but if you could separate it out, you'd be able
Speaker 1: to recover drinking water, fertilizer material, energy, and even metals
Speaker 1: like gold and silver. The key to mining our waste
Speaker 1: for these treasures would be in separating the waste streams
Speaker 1: at the source. At this point, that is difficult to
Speaker 1: do in our homes, where plumbing and appliances are set
Speaker 1: to dump dish SuDS and urine down the same pipe. However,
Speaker 1: Boyer's team realized it would be a lot easier at
Speaker 1: a giant football stadium where nobody's doing laundry but a
Speaker 1: lot of people are urinating, and right around the corner
Speaker 1: from the lab there just happens to be a football
Speaker 1: field with more than an acre of turf grass in
Speaker 1: need of fertilization, affectionately known as the swamp. The University
Speaker 1: of Florida football stadium seats ninety thousand fans during seven
Speaker 1: home games each year. A thesis written by Boyer's student
Speaker 1: Bryce sink Graph calculated how many times each person would
Speaker 1: use the bathroom during one event, and how much nitrogen, phosphorus,
Speaker 1: and potassium could be harvested from that urine. They concluded
Speaker 1: that in one football season, Gator fans would produce more
Speaker 1: than enough nutrients to fertilize the field for that season.
Speaker 1: Boyer said, at this point, nobody in the US is
Speaker 1: capturing urine on site and saving it in storage tanks
Speaker 1: to use as fertilizer, and he says that the easiest
Speaker 1: way to accomplish that would be to install special waterless
Speaker 1: urinals in the men's bathrooms, which are already being used
Speaker 1: in this country as water saving devices. After that, the
Speaker 1: urine could be piped to storage tanks under the stadium
Speaker 1: and held while chemistry did its magic, changing the chemical
Speaker 1: composition of the urine into a form of nitrogen usable
Speaker 1: on grass. Although mining our waste products for valuable nutrients
Speaker 1: may not be easy to implement overnight, Bowyer says it's
Speaker 1: important to look at the costs and benefits of it
Speaker 1: and how we might accomplish it. He said, the big
Speaker 1: question is how do we make our society more sustainable.
Speaker 1: The answer might hinge on our ability to change the
Speaker 1: way that we think about our own p Today's episode
Speaker 1: is based on the article recycling stadium urine as turk
Speaker 1: fertilizer could be a golden opportunity on how staff works
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