Safely Treat Human Urine, Get Clean Water and Grow Food, All in one Step! Hydroponic Nutrients!



This homemade hydroponics mini sewage treatment plant has all the nutrient solution it needs. Because the activated charcoal ( biochar ) is the growing medium, it actually filters urine and makes clean water as one of the byproducts. Charcoal has a very high cation exchange capacity and that enables the water to stay pure for a very long time without having any issues of bad smells, bacteria or dust particles in the water. The charcoal just sucks it all to itself. We can also grow lots of organic food using this system. Indirectly the organic foods we are growing actually help “clean” the charcoal of any organic mater that gets stuck to the charcoal. The urine (organic matter) is gobbled up by microbes living in and around the charcoal and their waste is then taken up by the plants. Having clean healthy food as a byproduct is another bonus of using this design. Please note that only one tier was used for cleaning the urine. This means we could probably add way more urine, if more plants were growing in all the tiers. Caution is advised if or when eating root crops without first cooking them using this system. Eating leafy greens is perfectly safe as the urine does not come in contact with the plants above ground. If a bigger system was used you could even deal with your sewage safely and not waste this valuable resource! One way would be to place it into some form of biodigester and pre-treat it. Then methane gas could also be produced. Another option is to use a compost toilet and keeping the waste separate. Compost toilets are great at dealing with solids but not so great at dealing with the urine. Also You ‘may’ need to place the system inside a pollytunnel / hoophouse in cooler climates, to have faster bacterial growth in order to deal correctly with the ‘ nutrients ‘ added. I encourage you to try it. Last but not least I would like to thank GreenStalk for their tower garden, as for one it has held up well and secondly it works very well too.