urine for some fertile and explosive ideas

I found a fascinating article on building a do-it-yourself urinal that basically just drains the urine into the ground. This is what it looks like:

After detailing how to make it, the author concludes with these remarks:

Urine is not full of toxic bacteria like excrement is, so there is no health risk to pumping it into the ground around your home in small quantities like this.

Urine even has fertilizer value for plants. Pure urine, like concentrated fertilizer, can burn plants, but if it is diluted with water, at least three parts water to one part urine, plants like it.

Don’t worry about plants dying around the buried buckets, or spreading disease. It won’t happen.

I live in the country, and this system works fine for me. I realize that urban environments create special limitations. Personally, I think the world is over-populated and our freedom is too often limited by that.

You can always dump your waste water in public sewers, but try to conserve flush water. Remember, I do it with a cup or less. Urinals in private bathrooms are not a bad idea.

Urine is actually good fertilizer, and a number of people use it in their gardens. (It is even called “liquid gold.”) While most people consider it gross, it is described as sterile and non-toxic.

So it would not appear to be a pollutant of the EPA-regulated variety — especially in small quantities of the sort a human might produce.

But here’s a related question. Pollution aside, is it illegal to pee in your own back yard?

Some people have accused actor Ashton Kutcher of breaking the law or violating the rights of others by peeing in his own yard. Depending on local laws, urination in one’s own yard might be indecent exposure if done in public view. But as the stuff is non-polluting, a neighbor would have a tough time arguing that the urine was a danger. So if Mr. Kutcher filled containers with his urine and then used them to fertilize his plants, I don’t think a neighbor’s complaint would hold, um, water. The idea might be gross to a lot of people, but grossness is not a health issue so far as I know. (It’s also gross to pee in the shower, but it is being increasingly recommended as a water conservation measure.)

A paper discusses the “newly emerging urine harvesting movement in the United States of America,” and endorses the practice:

Urine harvesting seems a good first step towards ecological sanitation practices because it is legal in the United States, whereas other practices are not.

One of the aspects of the upside-down five gallon bucket fascinates me.  While the purpose is not to harvest urine for fertilizer, I’m fascinated over what byproducts might accumulate over time. One of the chief components of urine is urea, which is a very simple step away from a very powerful explosive:

Urea nitrate is a fertilizer-based high explosive that has been used in improvised explosive devices in Israel, Iraq, and various other terrorism acts elsewhere in the world, like the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.^[1] It has a destructive power similar to better-known ammonium nitrate explosives, with a velocity of detonation between 11,155 ft/s (3,400 m/s) and 15,420 ft/s (4,700 m/s).^[2]

The simple recipe can be found all over the Internet.

I’m thinking that if you built and used the above urinal, and simply dug up the bucket after a year or so, there might be quite an accumulation of crystallized material on the below-ground surface. The average human produces around 230 gallons of urine per year, and if we consider that urine contains 9.3 grams per liter of urea, that’s 16790 grams (approximatedly 37 lbs.) of urea alone. And if the soil acted as a filter which allowed the water to pass through leaving behind other residue, there would be plenty of crystals high in nitrogen, which can and have historically been used to make gunpowder.

So perhaps Homeland Security could get involved in this matter. Who knows, with the utter lack of common sense that characterizes “authority” these days, maybe peeing in the back yard could lead to SWAT team raids!

We can’t be too careful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYVK6HCn9DQ