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Team R2D2 designs urine diverting toilet
A lego team of youth from Wisconsin has designed a urine diverting toilet that they call the Wizard! Abe recently spoke with them about this. Here is their story:
We are team R2D2, an FLL team of 10 middle school students (Hannah, Anvita, Autumn, Delaney, Anay, Ethan, Gaurav, Mathew, Rylee, Tierney & protege Aanya) from Sussex, WI. Our challenge was to determine a problem with the Earth’s human water cycle, and solve it. Below is our project journey.
To determine our project, we originally looked at ideas like pulling moisture from the air and making ocean water drinkable. However, we realized those concepts could damage the environment, so we decided to start over. On a joke, one of us googled ‘can you water your plants with urine’? The results that came up were very promising, so we decided to focus on this topic.
Our research on urine led us to the huge problem of dead zones. When urine is flushed away, it goes to a water treatment facility for cleaning, and eventually ends up back in our water where the nutrients can cause hypoxia, killing the marine life. We visited Jones Island Water Treatment Facility to learn more about this, and came to the conclusion that we could improve the dead zone situation by not sending urine back into our water. Instead, people could collect urine, and use it as a fertilizer. The biggest obstacle to this solution was getting potential users to get past the ‘gross factor’ of this idea.
We needed to design a toilet and plumbing system where users could collect and store urine conveniently and without any ick factor. We knew users wouldn’t want to disrupt their current habits, and definitely wouldn’t want to touch the urine. We designed the ‘Wizard Urine Diverting Toilet System’ that has a wall separating the front and back of the toilet bowl, thus conveniently separating urine from solid waste. We designed the urine to be collected in an underground storage tank, and conveniently accessible by hose bib.
To make sure our product would work and had value, we met with Eric Smith, a master plumber. He confirmed our toilet design was good, and gave us feedback to improve upon it. We met with Joe Fahey, on organic farmer, and he confirmed that there is a need for organic fertilizer, and that he would absolutely be willing to use urine. We facetimed multiple times with Abraham Noe-Hays, a pee-cycler from the Rich Earth Institute, and he shared his vast knowledge of pee-cycling with us, and expressed interest in our project as there is currently a great need for a more convenient toilet system that could collect urine.
Our research on toilets lead us to the fact that we could save large amounts of flush water. Urine, as a liquid, requires very little to rinse the toilet bowl. Feces could be flushed away with smaller amounts of water as well. Our toilet already had great impact from the value it provided to collect fertilizer and help in the reduction of dead zones. However, we realized that possibly the biggest benefit it could provide is it’s water savings! We did the math, and figured out that if everyone in the USA used the Wizard instead of traditional toilets, we could conservatively save 777 BILLION gallons of water annually. We also figured out the financial impact this could have on the US government, since they subsidize the majority of the cost of water. Using the Wizard could save over $20 BILLION annually!
We are so grateful for the help Rich Earth Institute has given us! Abe’s extensive knowledge, and his willingness to share it with us has been a valuable source of research for our team!
We are very excited about the work we’ve done on this project, and we continue to research and improve on our design!
Watch the video they made explaining everything about theWizard! https://www.powtoon.com/c/dXwMvQnzd2A/1/m
