Date: 22.1.2025
A team of chemists and agriculture specialists has developed a way to transform urea in wastewater, into percarbamide, which can be used as a fertilizer. In their paper published in the journal Nature Catalysis, the group describes their process and how well the resulting product worked in growing edible crops.
Urine is seen as a source of fertilizer because it is high in nitrogen and other rich compounds that are good for plant growth. Many home gardeners know that urine can be used as a fertilizer both for flower and vegetable gardens – the key is to mix it with a lot of water to prevent burning the plants.
Prior efforts to use urine as a source of fertilizer on a larger scale, however, have proven to be unfeasible due to industrial inefficiencies; it is much easier to use standard methods that involve extracting nitrogen from the air. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a way to use human and animal urine as a fertilizer for growing edible crops.
The process developed by the team involves creating sheets of graphite that were grown in a way that promoted defects in the way the atoms joined when they were used as an electrode. The result was then placed in a wastewater solution with a high concentration of urea.
Next, the team applied an electric current. Doing so pushed the urea, oxygen from the surrounding air, and hydrogen in the water to form solid percarbamide crystals. The crystals were then filtered from the water, ready for use as a fertilizer.
Image source: Shi et al. (2025), Nature Catalysis.
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