Scientists still haven’t developed a cure for the common cold, but who cares? The young scientists of the world are focusing their attention on what matters most: bricks made out of piss.
A group of South African students recently developed a brick made out of human urine. It’s a radical breakthrough for those of us long accustomed to clay, concrete, and metaphorical sh*t bricks.
They call them “bio-bricks.”
“In this example you take something that is considered a waste and make multiple products from it. You can use the same process for any waste stream. It’s about rethinking things,” Dr. Dyllon Randall, who supervised the student’s project at the University of Cape Town, told The Guardian.
The brick is believed to the world’s first made out of urine. It needs at least 30 liters of urine to grow.
Seeing as how the average human urinates an average of 300 ml per pee, that’s, uh, a lot of bathroom trips.
Urine not used to produce the bricks can be reprocessed as fertilizer. Best yet: urine bio-bricks don’t need to be kiln-fired like regular bricks, which release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as they’re being processed. Scientists consider them effectively zero waste.
Climate change is here and accelerating. We’ve got to rebuild this world, one piss brick at a time if we have to.
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