All males should urinate outside whenever possible.

Guys - an empty 2L milk or fruit juice container works perfectly for collecting urine. Then dlute this treasure 1 in 10 and put on the vegetable patch or other parts of the garden. No need buy fertlizer! Why flush away such a valuable resource?

I have to admit that I urinate into our garden whenever I can. We don't have a lawn. I must admit it began to smell after a while but a sprinkling of bicarb soda, daily hand watering and the retic at regulated intervals helps to dilute and dispel the urinearoma.

Surely every man knows to pee on the citrus.

but more broadly, isn't this a bit crazy? The money invested in sewerage infrastructure to pipe mixed urine and faeces is never going to be overtaken by a new system. Maybe, just maybe some new suburbs could get a separate urine pipe (if paid for by the beneficiaries) but the idea of ripping up existing streets and pipes is fanciful to say the least.

leaving aside the cultural aspects.

Now an interesting aside ... Saltpetre (potassium nitrate), an essential part of black gunpowder, was in part collected from cesspits, with the nitrates coming from urine. So Napoleon's successes in Europe were derived from an older version of this idea!

Oh, forgot to mention, urine is also a good DISINFECTANT.
For as long as I can remember, the underground miners in the nickel mines of Kalgoorlie would urinate on unjuries or sores they obtained furing their working hours, first adi kits in thise days were none existant, so the obvious thing to do if injured, would be to pee on it.
Betcha won't find that in the first aid books.

I am all for nutrient recycling but cannot help but feel angry reading articles like this, not at the authors but at the industry that keeps the current wasteful and expensive practices in place.

We were involved in very successful trials in Victoria to convert biosolids to energy and biochar. Everything was going extremely well until they seem to have realised what we had actually worked, and because of their own casual approach to the project it was working not just on composted biosolids but even better on the freshly collected stuff...

Following a conversation with the project manager when he realized the technology was not just a back end solution (no pun intended) but could revolutionise the way waste water was treated was the project seemingly deliberately derailed in rather blatant ways, and after and we delivered a working pilot plant to the site (a Victorian Magistrate in handing down judgement in our favour earlier this year went to some lengths to detail the apparent incompetence of the authorities managers in question and expressed disbelief that a project of this value to the community should be so treated).

Not only does the technology work but it is so cost effective it could be retrofitted to every towns waste water treatment plant, not just recovering the embodied energy and treating the solids but also producing its own filtration media (activated carbon) for tertiary treatment with which to collect not just the nutrients from the urine in the waste water stream in an easily transported and applied soil amendment, but to neutralise all the other undesirable stuff as well such as the pharmaceuticals and keep them out of the water ways.

The cost of building new waste water treatment plants could be slashed by millions of dollars, and here in lies the crux of the problem. The vested interests involved in maintaining the status quo, and why the industry would not feel threatened by urine diversion technologies as these ADD to the cost of the system without requiring any substantive changes in their business as usual.

Meanwhile the communities future is leached away.

SEI has come up with article on Practical Guidance on the use of Urine in Crop Production with field trails in various countries to improve Cereal and Vegetable production.

Where did the investigation begin? Was it a wide open problem, with for instance a starting point of :
‘Public health must be the overriding priority in the management of human excrement. However the community can no longer afford the waste of resources inherent in the present system?’

My reading of it suggests that ‘cost’ and ‘cultural change’ rated highly in what was looked at, as this paragraph implies.
‘Although ecological forms of sanitation that use little or no water and return all nutrients back to the soil would top a theoretical list, the new cultural attitudes and personal and logistical practices they require would be too great to be feasible for our cities today.’

Peter Davies comment is the only one that suggests to me that anyone has looked beyond these constraints, and in fact suggests that the whole exercise ought be revisited with input he and the organisation he represents/is part of can provide.

Were the costs of the present system quantified. The maintaining of aging structure, in a city such as Sydney, the cost of the ‘processing’ before discharge, the cost to the environment, the cost of the lost nutrients and the long term cost of continuing the present disposal methods?

Were these balanced against the gains to be made by changing the system?

To consider that the cost of change is too great, the cultural changes too difficult is simply pushing the issue on to later generations where the cost of change will have increased, as will the damage and loss inflicted by the present system, and the cultural change will be no less problematical.

The same thinking is apparent in the transport system, highlighted by the recent release of the ‘new’ transport plans for Sydney. ‘Brilliant’ we would have said, back in the early 60's. though of course we would have been wrong! Conceived by people who are addressing obsolete problems because they cannot see that the day of the motor vehicle for personal transport has past, that the world that gave rise to the phenomena has already gone, and that the necassary resources no longer exist.

Those who think in terms of motor vehicles, rail, light rail and mono rail are stuck with technology that is over 100 years old. Changing would be too expensive, people are wedded to their cars, ‘unthinkable!’

Unless we can see beyond 100 year plus old technology, we really are doomed!

Both article and P Davies experience most interesting. The important thing to do especially in new semi rural settlements and fringe metro areas is to get the local authority up to speed on new approaches and this means converting the consultant engineers they rely on , and making sure such alternatives are part of the education / training of new civil engineers .Also environmental/health inspectors in local govt. Things might have changed a bit in recent times but it used to be par for the course that these officers insisted on 2 tank septics and insisted that rural homes could not have composting systems . A member of my family installed a composting system in a small flat built to augment their accommodation - against the wishes of spouse I might add, but they and we found the bathroom- installed composting toilet worked really well, no odour. Of course they also had a worm farm and ended up with more home fert than they could really use even in their large vegie patch.

It's seems the Malthusian's have taken over the peak phosphorus wiki. The end of that entry states:
"These conservation and recycling practices would substitute the increased mining of phosphate rock, which is impossible after the global production peak of phosphate has been reached. Therefore, conservation and recycling is not a real solution and it is not even slowing down the inevitable decrease in global annual phosphate production. The global agricultural production could be sustained if the phosphate production could be sustained at the same level, but as it will start its inevitable decline and conservation and recycling practices can help by levelling off the decline in phosphorus production to a limited extent only, global agricultural production will inevitably decline as a consequence. The most affected by the reduced availability of phosphate fertlizer are the production of grains such as wheat, rice and corn. These grains will most likely increase in price naturally, because the price of phosphorus fertilizer as an input will increase. The rising price will most likely increase the use of grains for human nutrition and decrease their use as fodder for livestock and thus decrease the production and consumption of animal products. There will be always run-offs from agricultural fields and thus the recycling of phosphorus cannot be a closed loop, in other words additional phosphorus will be needed from some source even if all manure of humans and livestock would be recycled back to the fields."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus

Can recycling give us any hope? How much NPK does the human body consume of the food we eat? What percentage is excreted? What percentage of that could be returned to the land? What percentage of *that* is lost to run-off? Aldous Huxley was writing about this in the 1930's! It's time to do something, but I just see market forces at work.

Can we recover phosphorus from the oceans? Can we grow massive kelp farms or whatever, and maybe produce something edible and in this way top up the NPK going through our sewerage system back out to land to replenish the land? What biochar schemes can work in sync with keeping our soil fertile? How can we do this?