Alternative Uses For Urine

[Rodleroc]

Hi everyone, I'm a graphic design student currently in the final year of my degree and I'm doing some research into the problem of public urination.

 

One of my initial ideas was to use collected urine for perhaps fertiliser, but I was wondering if anybody could help me come up with any ideas. Any help would be most welcome... as you might have guessed I'm a layman, I don't even know if 'Organic Chemistry' is the right category for this...

 

Hoping you can help,

Rob.

[Horza2002]

If you wanted to do that, then you'd have to extract the urea from urine before letting the bacteria break it down into ammonia for fertiliser. Extracting it from all the other unwanted materials and getting it to a level legally required could be a problem.

 

Other uses it could used as a disinfectant and as a mild bleaching agent.

[insane_alien]

forget all that, first you need to collect the urine.

 

and as most public urination is done by the inebriated down alleyways and in door ways thats going to be pretty hard to do.

 

whatever you do, it would be far far more cost effective to simply produce the required chemical through industrial chemistry.

[UC]

Other uses it could used as a disinfectant and as a mild bleaching agent.

 

What?

[gbg112]

What?

 

Urea break down into ammonia which was and is still used in bleach.

[Fuzzwood]

No it is not. Hypochlorite is used in bleach.

[Phi for All]

Urea break down into ammonia which was and is still used in bleach.

If you mix ammonia with bleach you liberate chlorine gas which will cause massive cellular damage if you breathe it in. And there are even worse reactions depending on the mixture. Never, ever do this in an uncontrolled environment.

[Fuzzwood]

No you will liberate chloramine: NH₂Cl, which is also toxic while inhaled.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloramine

[Phi for All]

No you will liberate chloramine: NH₂Cl, which is also toxic while inhaled.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloramine

My mistake. And the BBC's as well, apparently:

 

That warning is there to protect you. Household bleach has a chemical formula of NaOCl - that is, one atom each of sodium, oxygen, and chlorine. Its chemical name, for the curious, is sodium hypochlorite. Ammonia has a chemical formula of NH3, that is, one atom of nitrogen and three atoms of hydrogen. When these two compounds are combined, the following reaction takes place:

 

2(parts)NaOCl + 2NH3 --> 2NaONH3 + Cl2.

 

Do you see that Cl2 on the right hand side there? This means one part chlorine gas, made up of diatomic (two atom) molecules. It also means that the chlorine gas has been liberated from the bleach, and is quite capable of causing you harm when inhaled!

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A795611

[hermanntrude]

the general gist is that you shouldn't mix things with bleach. it's very reactive and many of its reactions will liberate dangerous fumes.

[John Cuthber]

wtf is NaONH3?

[Fuzzwood]

My mistake. And the BBC's as well, apparently:

 

 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A795611

 

You are taking a news site serious?

[John Cuthber]

It's not even the BBC's news site.

[Phi for All]

I have to admit that I've heard in the past that mixing bleach and ammonia released chlorine gas, and when I googled to get a source, the beeb popped up first. Even though it's from their H2G2 section, I assumed the BBC would check with their science types for data like this. As I said before, my mistake.

[Capita]

it can yield chlorine gas or chloramine and there was one other gas that could be made but I dont remember off the top of my head but any way it depends on the environment temp pressure bleach/ammonia molar ratio ect but you generally end up with a mixture of all of them not shure of the amounts