When life gives you 20 million pigs’ worth of urine, make pig-piss-flavored cigarettes. Or, if you’re not a smoker, use the pig pee to make plastic dinnerware and fuel your car, or smooth it over your body for soft, supple hair and skin. Agroplast, a Denmark-based company, hopes to use its country’s surfeit of pig waste—the cause of contaminated ground water, dying plants, noxious air, and pissed-off neighbors—to make useful household products, from plastics to hair conditioner.
Here’s how to make your own urine-based spork: Collect urine, distill it to make a nice thick slurry, and remove the color pigments (this, happily, also gets rid of the smell). Add para-formaldehyde to react with the urea (the major waste product of urine), give it a stir, and you’re done—fresh polymers of urea formaldehyde, the solution to all your problems. The polymer can be adjusted in the final step depending on the desired product.
And if liquid waste isn’t your preferred source of household goods, dry fecal matter is also valuable. Agroplast can use dry waste to produce biogas, thermal energy, and soil improvement products.
