'Liquid gold': students make world's first brick out of human urine | Hacker News Reader

'Liquid gold': students make world's first brick out of human urine

theguardian.com

62 pointspseudolus21 comments

Now instead of just shitting bricks, you can piss bricks.

Seriously though, I wish the article had more information about material strength, time and cost. Eco-centric tech like this is great in my opinion, but is it something that's actually practical?

In the article they referenced if you want a brick stronger then a 40% limestone brick you just have to let these bricks grow a little longer. So they can be at least as strong as a limestone brick if that is any sort of reference.

Limestone is a 3 on the Mohs scale (1 = talc, 10 = diamond).

A kiln fired brick is a 5 to 7 depending on its constituent parts.

What is a beet's strength on the mose scale?

The byproduct of this reaction is a unit ammonia for each unit of urea used. Is large amounts of ammonia easier to dispose of than urea?

"When urea is hydrolysed by the urease enzyme from the microorganism, ammonia is released and becomes accumulated in the medium which then increases the pH, making it alkaline (Zoheir et al 2013)

(PDF) Integrating Biotechnology into Geotechnical Engineering: A Laboratory Exercise. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326113096_Integrati... [accessed Oct 25 2018]."

The decomposition of urea [(NH2)2CO] produces two equivalents of ammonia for each equivalent of urea. It's not clear from the article how much (if any) of the ammonia gets consumed by the bacteria.

> Is large amounts of ammonia easier to dispose of than urea?

Ammonia's boiling point is -33 C, so pure urea is a gas a room temperature.

When dissolved in water, ammonia is in equilibrium with ammonium hydroxide. So the stuff can stick around until consumed by microorganism or it evaporates.

Both urea and ammonia can be used as fertilizers.

Pure urea is not a gas at room temperature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea

Typo, that should be "ammonia."

Gives new meaning to the phrase Kidney Stones.

"world’s first brick made from human urine" seems a bit strong.

Maybe there are even earlier ones, but this is from 2010: https://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/architect-grow...

Edit: Ahh, I guess the nuance is that the first effort used extracted urea versus actually using urine.

Yeah, I thought that was a bit humorous. It seems like the original experiments didn't want to do a field test.

Using liquid gold as a resource to extract valuable phosphates is a long-time practice. For instance in 2013 the Amsterdam sewage treatment plant started a large-scale installation to process urine.

Here are some ins and outs on the hows and whys:

https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/p-phosphate-could-urin...

Could they embed urine powered batteries (https://newatlas.com/urine-battery/42866/, and many others) in the urine brick? These could bricks be part of a "smart" home/building, where every brick reports in as to its current condition, strength and mood!

Time-lapsed video of what this looks like once it's in the mold would be interesting. Some more technical specs about the time involved and volume of materials would be interesting as well. Maybe there will be a follow up article?

Myth Busters proved you can polish a turd, but how about a brick of piss?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI

I just hope the president sees this. He could realize his greatest dream -- the wall, by using his favorite material.

Good for Mars colonisation, perhaps? Piss your way to a new Villa! ;)

And now we know how we'll build our buildings on Mars.

It seems like it would take a very long time for a small number of residents to produce enough bricks to build anything via this method. Then again, it could still be more practical than utilizing local materials, particularly in the very early stages of colonization.

Youtube: World's sharpest urine knife.

Imagine the smell of that :)

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