This display asks the question, what's in our waste and what we currently do
with it and what we might do into the future. In our urine, which is one of our
wastes, there's lots of carbon, there's lots of nitrogen, and there's actually lots of water.
So Urinotron's a Science Gallery pop-up at the University of Melbourne.
We've got a whole series of microbial fuel cells where we take urine
from the public and we use those fuel cells to generate some electricity and
break down the carbon in the urine and from there we take the spent urine and
we put it through a series of columns and membranes and produce clean water.
Would you drink it? Oh great!
So have a look, it's nice and clean isn't it.
No there's no floating bits.
It's very, very pure water.
I reckon it's pretty cool. It's interesting how we can
use our piss quite literally to power stuff.
Yeah, I knew like you could get
water out of urine but not like the carbon and the nitrogen and everything
else so that was the surprising bit.
We need to be more sustainable with what we
do so I think it's a cool idea.
This is a collaboration between an artist in France and myself and at one
level it's supposed to draw people in where they see it and they say I wonder
what that is and then it's to start a conversation about the fact that we
dispose of a lot of our nutrients in our water every day and we don't reuse them.
In Urinotron, we really want people to re-imagine your waste we want to ask
difficult questions and get people to reassess things, that we literally flush
away or don't even think about it as a valuable resource. So since I donated to
Urinotron every single time I go to the toilet I feel a little bit of shame
that I'm flushing energy away.
The Vice-Chancellor of the university has
donated into the display, along with about probably around about 500 others.
So we've had a great reaction from literally the top to the bottom of the
university in terms of the donations into the system.
It's really starting conversations where at the beginning of the conversation people are like this is
disgusting I do not want to do it and by the end of it they're going yeah this is
something that we should think about. So that changing, a flipping a switch of
something that was taboo to no longer being taboo is an absolute joy to behold.
I think it is the future of waste and resourcefulness in the sense that we
cannot continue to use a lot of energy to produce fertilisers when we throw a
lot of fertiliser away every day. We can't continue to throw away good water
every day we need to break the pollution cycle in that system and we need to use
a lot less energy in dealing with our waste.
So, that's Urinotron.