Planting a urinal in a straw bale… What a funny idea!
At the Center for Alternative Technology in Pantperthog, Wales, visitors are invited to urinate on bales of straw!
An invitation to combine two common types of waste:
👉 urine (nitrogen)
👉 straw (carbon)
A goal: To make manure. A free soil improver for the vegetable garden!
First observation: urinating on a bale of straw can cause a few inconveniences… splashes in return from an unwelcome stream of urine.
The ideas are flowing…
What if we were to urinate directly into urinals made from straw… in other words, agglomerate this cereal waste to make an object! Make a mould and produce parts. Only impregnated with urine will they degrade irreparably…
And then… too much energy to manufacture and transport… An LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) that’s not really optimised!
Another solution: what if we simply planted a funnel in the middle of a bale of straw? A urinal/funnel… a URITONNOIR! 💡
The first silhouettes are sketched out. The choice of material seems strategic.
An object linked to the environment… so necessarily biodegradable… in corn starch for example to be compostable? Another dead end in terms of LCA.
The limit of biodegradable materials… in contact with urine. The urinal will become, by default, DISPOSABLE. It will require a lot of energy and materials to produce it and produce it and produce it again…
This utensil MUST BE REUSABLE, so let’s think “SUSTAINABLE”.
Stainless steel? Too heavy to hold in the straw!
Let’s make it out of the same material as ecocups, the returnable cups commonly found at festivals. In other words, plastic. There are contexts where this material has real relevance. We chose PP, polypropylene, a recyclable plastic.
And as the urinal is designed to be used outdoors, we need to protect it from UV rays and frost.
One of the main difficulties in eco-design is identifying the RIGHT material.
Unlike ecocups, which are accumulated at home (the deposit applied is still not high enough, €1…), no-one will leave a festival with a urinal under their arm…
And so the uritonoir was born!
A small, affordable object, cut out of a sheet of PP, shipped flat and easy to assemble yourself.
A small object that tells a simple story:
Stop scattering your urine all over the place!
Instead, concentrate it in a bale of straw.
And use it as fertiliser for your vegetable garden!
