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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting paper. I had read about recycling cow urine in dairies[1] and I wonder if the yeast would be able to make hydroxypatite out of it. At the time I came across this paper I was looking at people creating financial incentives to produce ammonia (and ammonium nitrate) at scale for farming. We import a bunch of it[2] and making it locally would be a win/win.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...

[2] https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/USA/yea...

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Here in the Netherlands the impact of Nitrogen coming from cattle excretions (mostly through ammonia I believe) is paralizing the entire country (due to the impact on the environment, it's now blocking the building of - very much needed - housing. So there could be a win/win/win/win there.

Interesting. First time I've heard of this outside the UK. In my local area, there's a near total moratorium on new-builds. The reasons are complex, but it's a mixture of agriculture having poisoned all the rivers, housing which is not connected to mains waste water (and people just not maintaining their private waste water systems, which are often just tanks of excrement mixed with chemicals, overflowing into nature) and, even if houses connected to mains, those constantly overflow into storm drains and make the rivers and coasts dangerous to swim in. All of that while it's completely clear that if we need one thing, it's more housing. Quite a predicament we find ourselves in.

California is like this, for different reasons. Mostly the leaders think nature > humanity so the more they cap the knees of civilization, more for nature, and that's a good and meaningful legacy in their minds. Of course this is a politically dangerous thing to speak up about publicly, so it's more along the lines of "uhhh we need to make sure the house you build is safe, so you need 50,000 pages describing how safe it is, must be evaluated by an army of Phds, and rejections take 5 years"

There are startups doing it directly from air (with solar power): e.g., https://www.talusag.com/

There's lots of exciting development in this space and I hope they can thrive in a world owned by fossil fuel companies.

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