10 Things You Can Do with Your Own Urine

Remember the uproar Ke$ha created when she drank her own urine on the 2013 MTV docu-series, Ke$ha: My Crazy Beautiful Life? Unlike brushing her teeth with a bottle of Jack, in this case the eccentric-outfit-and bright-eye-shadow-sporting pop star may have actually been onto something. As Coen van der Kroon writes in his book, Golden Fountain: The Complete Guide to Urine (yes, it’s a real book), “By drinking your own urine and massaging yourself with it, you can remain or become perfectly healthy and can recover from the simplest of ailments to the most serious of illnesses.” In fact, for centuries the uses for human urine have been well regarded, and it has been thought to have special healing properties. Now, we’re not about to go and recommend that you replace the bubbly or your morning OJ with a certain other yellow liquid, but it turns out that the stuff you’ve been flushing actually does serve some other purposes. Here are 10 uses for human urine that will make you think before you tinkle:

1. You can get your laundry clean

These days laundry detergent comes in every scent, type, and color. In ancient Rome that wasn’t the case. Instead, fullones, the ancient washers used different alkalis and ammonia-containing agents—two of which were human and dog urine—to remove dirt from garments. They would leave containers on street corners for people to urinate in and take them away once they were full.

2. Fix fabric dye

Remember how you used to tie-dye white t-shirts at camp? Nowadays, tie-dye kits use special chemicals, but in the past, plant-based dyes were fixed into the fabric using a mordant so the dye wouldn’t run. Because of its high level of ammonia, one of the most popular mordants was stale urine. Families would leave chamber pots out to collect urine for dyeing. At one point the demand for urine in 16th-century England was so high that textile-manufacturing towns, like those along the Yorkshire Coast, would import it from big cities like London and Newcastle.

4. Whiten your teeth

Turns out, the ammonia in urine isn’t just good for fixing dye and making gunpowder. Ancient Romans used urine to whiten their teeth, as the ammonia would bleach and remove stains. Suddenly morning breath doesn’t seem so bad.

5. Sterilize wounds

If produced by healthy kidneys, urine—which contains no living organisms—is sterile. It may, however, become contaminated on its way out of the body. For this reason and given the lack of safer cleaning substances, Henry VIII’s surgeon, Thomas Vicary, was said to recommend that battle wounds be cleaned and treated with urine.

6. Treat skin conditions

Despite what we typically think, urine is not a waste product—in fact, it is about 95-98% water, with the remainder forming a combination of hormones, minerals, and salt. If you’re not too squeamish, you can treat acne, eczema, and psoriasis by dabbing on a little urine using a clean, damp towel and leaving it on for a few minutes before rinsing it off. Be sure to collect the urine using the “clean-catch method,” that is, beginning to urinate and collecting it mid-stream. Morning urine is thought to be best for face treatments because the hormones become more concentrated overnight.

7. Generate power

Why flush it when you can use it to power your cell phone? In Nigeria, four girls created a pee-powered generator that can generate six hours of electricity with one liter of urine. It separates out the hydrogen in urine, removes the moisture, and pushes the hydrogen gas into the generator. Similarly, scientists in Singapore created a battery that is activated by biofluids like urine and can be used to power devices that test for diseases.

8. Treat infertility

Women who don’t respond to fertility treatments using the drug clomiphene to stimulate the release of hormones often then undergo injections of gonadotropins—hormones that stimulate the ovaries to produce egg-containing follicles. Gonadotropins are typically produced in a lab, but they can also be extracted from purified urine.

9. Use it in compost and fertilizer

Manure is well known as a fertilizer, but it turns out that there are uses for urine in gardening, too. Urine contains loads of nitrogen, which is crucial for plants and usually a main component of commercial fertilizers. After observing local farmers who frequently peed on their crops and conducting a study published in Scientia Horticulturae, researchers in Nepal found that pepper plants grown in soil containing a mix of human urine and compost grew the tallest and yielded the most peppers. And researchers in Finland found that tomato plants fertilized with urine and wood ash yielded almost four times the number of tomatoes of those that weren’t fertilized.

10. Turn it into drinking water

They say necessity is the mother of innovation, so it’s no surprise that the folks at NASA, who have to deal with the challenges of outer space travel, created the forward osmosis bag (FOB) system, which turns wastewater, like urine and gray water, into water that is safe to drink. Cheers!

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