UCT’s urinals the source of ideas for globally acclaimed engineeering students
Liquid gold has been discovered at the University of Cape Town (UCT). It comes in the form of urine‚ which engineering students have transformed into fertiliser and bricks. Now UCT says urine from its urinals has the potential to produce six tonnes of fertiliser a year — twice the amount it uses on its sports fields. Said civil engineering lecturer Dyllon Randall: "Chemically speaking‚ urine is liquid gold. It makes up less than 1% of domestic wastewater but contains 80% of the nitrogen‚ 56% of the phosphorus and 63% of the potassium of this wastewater. "We literally pee away these valuable nutrients every day." After spending two years in Switzerland working on a "reinvent the toilet" challenge funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation‚ Randall challenged four civil engineering doctoral students to continue his work‚ which was aimed at making toilets self-sufficient. Craig Flanagan built a urinal containing calcium hydroxide‚ which reacted with urine to produce calcium phosph...
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