"Going" green

[cornivore]

But what I ate was yellow (I must have the blues).

[Teichu]

If you start doing photosynthesis then, I write on it.
What I eat is mainly red, sometimes yellow (what color is onions?) And often green.

[brimstoneSalad]

Corn is one of the greenest foods on the planet. Look at those yields.

[Teichu]

Yep, that true
But I don' like corn

[cornivore]

Have you heard about the white hominy movement... what kind of racist shit is that?

[cornivore]

Anyway, what about going green while peeing? Besides eating asparagus, I was thinking in terms of conserving water lately. I had wanted to minimize flushes, but it grosses others out to see urine it in a toilet (gee whiz)! Well, I was also saving my 48 ounce apple sauce jars, for odds and ends, and thinking today that I might as well pee in all of them! Then I was wondering how many jars full would optimize that one flush, yet it occurred to me that maybe the optimal number of flushes could be zero. Hmm, I hadn't heard of this, but in looking up whether pee was used as fertilizer, it appears so: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants... Aha, I'll just have to water those plants with my peeganism, as it were!

Guidelines on the Use of Urine and Faeces in Crop Production

General considerations
Urine is a valuable source of nutrients, used since ancient times to enhance the growth of plants, notably leafy vegetables. There are different ways of using urine. The most obvious is to use urine directly to fertilize crops and this is the use on which recommendations are given below...

Fertilizing effect of urine
Urine used directly after storage is a high quality, low cost alternative to the application of N-rich mineral fertilizer in plant production. The nutrients in urine are in ionic form and their plant-availability compares well with chemical fertilizer. Urine is best utilized as a direct fertilizer for N-demanding crops and leafy vegetables...

Strange, it isn't like I never went in the bushes, yet it hadn't occurred to me to go there more often on ethical grounds... alrighty, stand back (I'll show you why the grass is always greener).

[sykkelmannen]

Here's what I do to minimize flushes:
I save greywater in buckets and use that water for flushing the toilet. I set a bucket in the bathtub under the tap, good for washing hands, veggies and fruit. Have a wide container I use for collecting water during a shower inside the bathtub.
Water from the washing machine can also be dumped into buckets instead of the drain and I do that too. Need several buckets for that one.
I tried before but I don't save the water from dishwashing anymore, it's a bit too inconvenient and greasy/dirty.

Definitely if you have the option to pee outside, you should do that.

[brimstoneSalad]

Here's what I do to minimize flushes:
I save greywater in buckets and use that water for flushing the toilet. I set a bucket in the bathtub under the tap, good for washing hands, veggies and fruit. Have a wide container I use for collecting water during a shower inside the bathtub.
Water from the washing machine can also be dumped into buckets instead of the drain and I do that too. Need several buckets for that one.
I tried before but I don't save the water from dishwashing anymore, it's a bit too inconvenient and greasy/dirty.

Definitely if you have the option to pee outside, you should do that.

Washing machines have internal pumps, you can hook it up (with a water tight seal) to a pipe and carry that water to a reservoir right above your toilet. I've seen people build shelves with greywater tanks (like for RVs) above their toilets. Plumbing-wise it's pretty simple, although if you don't own your place something like that might get you evicted and there is some risk of the water spilling if you don't do it right. Calling a plumber would be a good idea if you're not 100% sure about your setup (there are some good plans online).

Definitely worth installing a greywater system instead of using buckets, though, it's all pretty inconvenient and you have to consider the value of your time (including the environmental value, given the opportunity cost of outreach or other environment-saving measures you could be taking instead).

[cornivore]

Definitely if you have the option to pee outside, you should do that.

People have told me not to in the past, and I had the impression that peeing on plants could be bad for them, which is why this hadn't crossed my mind before. It sounds like the best way to do this on a regular basis is to use a shovel and bury it a little (unless it's a rainy day).

Practical Guidance On The Use Of Urine In Crop Production

Application technique
For best fertilizing effect and to avoid ammonia losses, urine should be incorporated into the soil as soon as possible after application, instantly if possible. A shallow incorporation is enough, and different methods are possible. One is to apply urine in small furrows that are covered after application. Washing the nutrients into the soil with subsequent application of water is another option. When spreading urine, it should not be applied on leaves or other parts of the plants, as this can cause foliar burning. Spraying urine in the air should also be avoided due to the risk of nitrogen loss through gaseous emissions of ammonia and the hygiene risk through aerosols. Drip irrigation with urine is another possible application technique. However, when this technique is used, measures must be taken to avoid clogging of emitters. Some plants (e.g. tomatoes) in their early stages are sensitive to having their roots exposed to urine, while on many crops no negative effect is seen at all. Therefore, before the sensitivity of a crop is known, it is wise not to simultaneously expose all the roots of the plant to urine, be it neat or diluted. Instead, urine can be applied either prior to sowing/planting or at such a distance from the plants that the nutrients are within reach of the roots. For annual plants this distance may be about 10 cm.

Odour when using urine as a fertilizer
Bad odour is culturally associated with pathogens. However, smell may also signal that urine contains nutrients since ammonia smells strongly. Experience shows that if the urine is spread close to and directly onto the soil and watered down there is little smell. Handling of urine is naturally a smelly activity and procedures minimizing air exposure, e.g. by using closed containers, application close to soil and immediate incorporation or irrigation, are strongly recommended. All of these measures will also contribute to minimizing ammonia losses and protecting health.

Thanks, I hadn't read about greywater either, that's interesting. I guess some of it might be used to rinse urine into the soil as well. I'll start by saving my dish water. I don't use soap to wash dishes, because they don't need degreasing. But I could dump the water that I use when scrubbing my pots and mixing bowls into a bucket, instead of dumping it down the drain. Then I'd use that instead of a shovel for getting my pee irrigated, along with composting more of my table scraps (instead of those crumbs going in the sink). Another good thing about peeing in jars is that I can keep track of my daily urine output this way ("Careful monitoring of UO could lead to earlier recognition of acute kidney injury and better fluid management"...). Better fluid management, that's it.

But wait, there's more... what about urine therapy? Well, supposedly astronauts drink it out of necessity (like a man on a mission: The reclamation and reuse of water from human urine is mandatory for long duration space missions...), and California is following 'suit'. I guess I'd treat urophagia as a raw food preparation, and boil it at least... not so fast though, I'd have to read more about that: distillation, if necessary, and I suppose pee-steamed veggies could be more efficient. Another way to wet the appetite, right?

Yeah, sort of, but I wouldn't call it appetizing after all. I hadn't steamed anything before, so first I used a liter of plain water to cook a couple of diced potatoes in a steamer. They were good, I cooked them for ten minutes after the water was boiling and noted the smell of the steam (which was like that of potatoes, naturally). Then I tried the same thing using a liter of my darkest and most aromatic urine from the morning hours (it didn't stink, but was like the typical smell of this sort of specimen). The steam itself didn't smell good though (not as bad as animal organs cooking, but not much better either—kind of like burning flux too), and there was a hint of it in the cooked potatoes (both smell and flavor). Salt and pepper is enough to make them taste okay, but I probably wouldn't cook with distilled pee again, unless it was necessary, or I'd try pouring something like vinegar or soy sauce in the fluid to flavor the steam differently. Yeah, well I'll have to try that at least once for future reference... Umm, wow, it's all the same cooked in urine. Half a cup of each flavor together didn't change anything. Yuk!

Anyway, the thing about steaming with water is that the water from the pot could be resused for drinking, so there wasn't much of a point to my experiment, as far as conserving water. I was mostly curious as to whether another fluid would flavor the food indirectly like that (I guess it's about the same concept as a smokehouse then, steaming that is). Something I got out of it is that I used to think nixtamalized corn smelled like pee, but actually it's nowhere near as bad as cooking this stuff. So now I think it smells pretty good!

This kind of result was also something I read about earlier, so it wasn't a big surprise:

Fundamentally, there are both non-volatile and volatile materials contained in urine that require treatment for their elimination. The former are characterized by the salts, primarily sodium chloride, and by urea and pigments, and the latter principally by ammonia and phenols. Many of these materials are toxic to various degrees and, as such, should be eliminated. Unfortunately, no single method is known that will extract both types. Distillation alone is an ineifectual means for obtaining potable water from urine. Other experimenters have tried distillation both at atmospheric and reduced pressure. In general, the material produced was odorous, alkaline and contained many materials that made it unfit for human consumption. Further treatment, such as chlorination, ion exchange, or filtration improved the quality. A severe weight penalty would be incurred if the filter technique or the ion exchange process was relied upon. Use of chlorine alone was suitable only for destroying the pathogens that may exist. The odor and, in some cases, the color remained.—Recovery of potable water from human metabolic wastes

Of course, if urine is purified in space, it can be done, but isn't so simple, as they say. I thought maybe they were only referring to drinking it, or that would be worse I guess. Well, I really wanted to steam peas with pee, except I didn't want the flavor to be harder to detect. You can't mistake the smell though, which ruins everything, so it probably doesn't matter. Even if I were using it to "double boil" something, that wouldn't be pleasant (or better to take outside).

Speaking of smells, I checked the spot where I dumped about 2 gallons of pee in the grass or dirt yesterday—when I also rinsed it with about as much greywater. No odor there, so that works great. I'll just stick to letting the plants drink it (instead of being a space cadet, as it were). Thanks for the tips, there, it would have smelled like an outhouse otherwise.

[sykkelmannen]

Definitely worth installing a greywater system instead of using buckets, though, it's all pretty inconvenient and you have to consider the value of your time (including the environmental value, given the opportunity cost of outreach or other environment-saving measures you could be taking instead).

This sounds good in theory but it's a mess in real life. Greywater isn't clean water anymore. You'd be surprised to see how dirty the buckets get. Greywater from the washing machine starts to smell rather bad in about a day or two, it's important to use it while it's fresh instead of mixing in more water.
Timewise, this takes probably less than five minutes daily to manipulate the buckets. Sometimes you can see the beauty in low-tech. I certainly can.

If you want to save time, quit your job I do have the time on my hands. What other environment-saving measures would you suggest?

it would have smelled like an outhouse otherwise.

If an outhouse smells, it ain't done right. I've had the pleasure to rest in some amazing, odorfree outhouses. It's a pity really, cos an outhouse is a brilliant solution to human waste.