You want to save the environment, right? Live a sustainable lifestyle, save the world’s 13 Icelandic snow owls, that kind of thing.
Then you will certainly agree with a University of Florida professor’s idea to collect the massive amount of urine that trickles forth from the 90,000 or so fans who attend home football games at the University of Florida to fertilize the gridiron.
The professor is Treavor Boyer, reports Reuters.
Urine is chock–full of phosphorous, potassium and other nutrients, see, and those nutrients would help the grass grow green and strong at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium at Florida Field — popularly called “The Swamp.”
Boyer, an assistant professor in Florida’s department of environmental engineering sciences, wants to collect fans’ urine in massive vats and process it.
“What you’ll see is that you can collect enough nitrogen over those seven home football games to meet the nutrient requirements for that field for the growing season,” he told Reuters.
“So you collect urine in the storage tank. Then what you want is for it to sit for a period of time, probably on the order of several weeks. That allows it to change chemistry and it is an important change in chemistry where the nitrogen goes from urea, which is excreted from our metabolism and it gets transformed into ammonia.”
Boyer and a team of urine scientists are working in the University of Florida’s urine lab to perfect this process of extracting ammonia from pee. They are also developing a plumbing system which uses far less water than regular bathrooms use.
Also, the University of Florida has a urine lab.
Boyer said he hopes people will start thinking of recycling their personal waste the way they currently think about recycling aluminum cans.
“That’s what I want people to think about every time they urinate, like wow, those are nutrients that could have been saved and re-used,” the professor told Reuters.
Boyer’s big idea to nourish the University of Florida football field with liquid waste does not appear to be related to the exploits of the pee bandit who operated around the University of Florida in 2014. The notorious pee bandit, who remains on the lam as far as The Daily Caller knows, sneakily urinated on at least four women. (RELATED: The University Of Florida Pee Bandit Strikes Again)
The University of Florida has historically been a trailblazer in the area of human excretion. In 1965, a team of scientists at the school invented Gatorade to replace the elements lost when athletes sweat. Originally, the beverage was a simple mixture of water, sodium, sugar, potassium, phosphate, and lemon juice.
In 1967, Georgia Tech football coach Bobby Dodd famously blamed his team’s lack of Gatorade for a 27-12 Orange Bowl loss to Florida (which had Steve Spurrier at quarterback). “We didn’t have Gatorade,” Dodd lamented. “That made the difference.”
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