Water, Sewage & Effluent July August 2018 | Page 35

UCT requires four tons of fertiliser for their sports fields.
“If you collected all the urine on campus just from
the urinals, we could produce seven tons of fertilizer
— offsetting the financial costs of the new system,” he
explained.
The idea is also moving off campus. Property giant
GrowthPoint is piloting the system at a new development
in Gauteng. The urine will be stored in the basement and
then transported off site for fertiliser production.
“By harvesting urine also from women and girls, one
can double the amount of fertiliser produced,” said
Janette Neethling, from consulting engineers Partners in
Development (PID), in a separate session.
Research by PID in collaboration with the Water
Research Commission found that girls and women are
willing to use urinals, especially in schools and public
places.
Neethling also touched on the fact that urinals can be a
more cost-effective way to meet the need for more toilets
in schools that make use of open-pit toilets.
Liquid Gold aims to roll out about 1 000 of these urinals
to schools across the country, where urine can be
collected, stored, and then transported to be processed
into fertiliser.
If urine is the new ‘liquid gold’, then we need to find a
good way to collect it from half our population.
This was the opinion of Dr Dyllon Randall from the
University of Cape Town, who was speaking at the Water
Institute of South Africa’s biennial conference, held
recently in Cape Town.
“We combine our faeces and urine with really good
quality water and we send it to a wastewater plant,” said
Randall. “Urine only makes up about 1% of the wastewater
but it contains over 80% nitrogen, 70% potassium, and
50% phosphorus — these are three key nutrients needed
to make any inorganic fertiliser,” he explained.
His team successfully produced urine fertiliser from
a waterless urinal device — made up of a 25-litre
container, pipe, and funnel that was placed at UCT’s new
engineering building and at a male residence
One container of urine produced about 276 grams of
fertiliser.
Randall said although this process would conserve
water in the drought-stricken Cape Town, the financial
savings potential is also substantial. “UCT uses about
eight Olympic-sized swimming pools — based on
2017 values — of flushing water just to flush urinals
each year.”
innovations
Your urine is the new liquid gold …
UCT’s sports grounds alone require four tons of fertiliser.