Do we have to start saving our own pee to produce phosphorus for farming?
SOME scientists are working on the idea that we do you know. Fortunately, they’ve really not grasped an important part about the world that we live in:
American families may soon be using waterless toilets and recycling their urine, according to new research.
Chemical engineers at the University of Florida have been looking at ways to extract phosphorus – a life-sustaining element – from urine, before it enters the sewage system and becomes diluted.
Since estimates suggest that phosphorous – which occurs as phosphate rocks and is mined for crop fertilizer – could be exhausted in the next 50 to 100 years, urine recycling may be the key to conserving the non-renewable resource in the future.
Phosphorous is indeed essential for a modern farming system. And we would be in a very pretty pickle indeed if we started to run out of it. However, given that there’s a 13,000 years supply out there we’re most unlikely to do so.
Yes, I know, they’ve said a 50-100 years supply. But the idiots aren’t understanding the words that the mining industry uses to measure things. The 50 years is a measure of mineral reserves. The 13,000 is of mineral resources. The scientists (and all of the environmentalists who are believing the woo) seem to think that the mineral reserves are all there is. But that’s just not what the word means: to a reasonable level of accuracy reserves are what is in the mines we are already extracting from. Mineral resources are the other collections of rock that we know about that we could go and dig holes in if we wanted to.
No, resources are not the undiscovered stuff: they have already been discovered but we’ve not done all the really detailed work we need to do before we start to mine them. And the total amount that we could use includes, of course, all of the stuff that we haven’t disvoered yet: so it’s even larger than that 13,000 years number.
Basically this idea, this new toilet, where you shit in one pot and piss in another is ludicrous: simply because people just don’t understand that we’re not about to run out of phospohrous. Nor, if truth be told, any damn mineral or metal.
Posted: 1st, July 2013 | In: Money, Technology Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
