From Tooth Whitener to Electricity: 5 Unusual Uses for Urine

Unusual Uses for Urine

Chances are you aren’t thinking about your urine today. You pass it, you flush it and that’s pretty much it. But did you know that urine has always been important for scientific and industrial advancement? Alchemists—practitioners who tried to turn anything into gold—thought the golden color of urine was connected to a similar pigment in gold. After countless experiments a German alchemist didn’t arrive at gold, but he did manage to produce something completely different: a substance from boiled-down urine that came to be known as phosphorus, the 13th element. This element played a major role in advances not only in medicine, but in dyes and even the world’s first matches.

Today urine is being considered for an impressive array of medical and practical uses—from serving as a source of electric power to helping in the diagnosis of cancer. For some scientists, golden urine is like, well, liquid gold. Here are some ways researchers are studying it today.

First, a Quick Look Back

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Throughout history urine has been used for purposes that might seem rather nasty to us today. Decades before the introduction of teeth whitening strips, for instance, ancient Romans used to rinse their mouths with urine to brighten their smiles. Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus wrote, "Egnatius, because he has snow-white teeth, smiles all the time...in the country of Spain what each man pisses, he’s used to brushing his teeth and red gums with, every morning, so the fact that your teeth are so polished just shows you're the more full of piss.” In 16th-century Europe, Ambroise Paré, who served as royal surgeon for a number of French kings, recommended that itching eye-lids could be washed in the patient’s urine—as long as it had been kept “all night in a barber’s basin” first. There is also evidence to suggest that urine was occasionally used an antiseptic. Henry VIII’s surgeon, Thomas Vicary, recommended all battle wounds be washed with urine. In 1666, it was even recommended that urine to be used against the plague. That may sound strange, but urine is sterile when it leaves the body and it may have been safer than cleaning wounds with the water of that time.

Drink Up?

In the 1600s, the father of modern chemistry, Robert Boyle, advised certain patients to drink a “moderate draught of their own urine” each day. Although you might grimace at the thought, the fact is that urine therapy (aka auto-urine therapy)—the drinking of your own urine or applying it on your skin—has historical roots in Egypt, China and India and is still popular throughout the world today. Urine, which is 95 percent water and 2.5 percent urea along with salts, enzymes and minerals, is believed by practitioners to have health enhancing powers—everything from relieving allergies to boosting the immune system. Former Prime Minister of India Morarji Desai, who died 10 years ago at age 99, drank a glass of urine every day and massaged and washed himself with it, according to “Gold Fountain: Complete Guide to Urine Therapy,” by Coen van der Kroon. British actress Sarah Miles has stated that she’s been drinking her own urine for more than 30 years.“It’s wonderful for your skin, fantastic for your hair, your immune system—it’s fantastic for everything,” she has said. Some baseball players urinate on their hands to treat calluses, while many boxers have been known to drink their urine for performance enhancement. Urine therapists suggest that morning urine caught in midstream is best and that it should be sipped, not guzzled.

Golden Urine Goes Green

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If you are not inclined to drink your own urine, what about urine recycled into beer? Some 100,000 visitors to Roskilde, northern Europe’s largest music festival, had the unusual opportunity this summer to have their urine collected and saved for local farmers to use as fertilizer for barley crops grown to make beer. While farmers and gardeners have harnessed the fertilizing power of urine for decades, those attending Roskilde 2017 will sip beer from barley fertilized by their own urine. “It’s about changing our approach to waste, from being a burden to being a valuable resource,” said Leif Nielsen, with the Danish Agriculture and Food Council which partnered with festival organizers. To promote “beercycling” festival goers were directed to bathrooms with specially designed storage tanks. “The huge amount of urine produced at festivals was having a negative impact on the environment and the sewage system,” Nielsen said. “Beer cycling will turn those many liters of urine into a resource.”

Urine-tricity

Urine is also being used to give hope to those in need of technology for basic needs. A toilet that generates electricity from urine has been devised by researchers at the University of the West of England (Bristol) in collaboration with Oxfam, the global aid agency. The toilet uses live microbes which feed on urine and convert it into electrical power. It is hoped that the the pee-powered urinal, which lights up when a person uses it, will be used in international refugee camps, where women and girls are at risk of sexual assault in dark sanitation areas. “By lighting bits of the camp using this technology we can create a safe environment so that women can go out, use the toilets at night, do things at night in a safer environment,” Andy Bastable, head of water and sanitation at Oxfam, told Reuters. The agency hopes to have the first toilet sent out to refugee camps in January, 2016.

Medical Advances

Medical researchers are exploring a variety of ways that urine can be used for future treatments. At present, most commonly used stem cells for therapy are obtained via tissue biopsies. However researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine and colleagues have identified stem cells in urine that can be directed to become multiple cell types. In a small 2013 study in the journal Stem Cells, researchers reported they had successfully directed stem cells from urine not only to become bladder-type cells, but the urine-derived cells could also form bone, cartilage, fat, skeletal muscle, nerve, and endothelial cells, which line blood vessels. At Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, researchers are testing urine to help diagnose kidney cancer, which is often not discovered until it has spread. The scientists have developed a noninvasive method to screen for kidney cancer that involves measuring the presence of proteins in the urine. The researchers report that the urine biomarkers were more than 95 percent accurate in identifying early-stage kidney cancers. They hope to develop a urine screening test to identify kidney cancer at early stages before there are symptoms.