The next time you ‘take a leak’, consider the valuable resources you’re flushing away. “Urine contains all the essential components for plant growth, such as phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium,” says Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Dena Fam. “Yet our sewers carry these nutrients essential for agricultural production away from our urban centres and discharge them into waterways where they have the potential to negatively impact aquatic ecosystems.” Fam is a driving force in Australian and international research on urine diversion systems. As a result of her PhD research, UTS’s new Engineering and Information Technology building is installed with urine diversion (UD) pipework and the Barangaroo development in Sydney’s CBD has incorporated it into their design plans. Completed last year under the supervision of Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) Deputy Director Cynthia Mitchell, Fam’s PhD examined the transdisciplinary issues associated with trialling urine diverting systems in Australia, to determine how viable urine recovery and reuse is in practice. It’s a squeamish topic, acknowledges Fam, a researcher with ISF and the Centre for Management and Organisation Studies in the UTS Business School. But with global pressure on food production and infrastructure due to rapidly growing urban populations, recovering and reusing urine as a fertiliser
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