This pee-powered device wants to charge your phone

The semi-portable pee-power device is an appropriate yellow colour.

Turning waste into power is a much sought after quest apparently. These UK scientists have been at work for 30 long years, trying to come up with a way of turning your pee into a mobile charger.

Working long hours into the nights, the guys from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory demonstrate a method you can resort to in case of emergencies. They also hoped that powering up small devices in developing countries could become a welcome alternative.

Now, for those wondering how one exactly goes about extracting legit power from your pee, here are the technicalities. Apparently, by using a microbial fuel cell (MFC), you can convert organic matter directly into electricity. Though, you’ll need 12 ceramic cylinders with a cathode and an anode stacked onto each other, reports Gizmag. As the urine flows through these cylinders and that one-by-one acts as a battery, extracting power. Fancy that! The remaining urine is then inevitably collected in a waste basket.

In the video there’s a dedicated urine bin, people appropriately washing hands and a simple demonstration of the device.

The ingenious not-so-mad scientist behind this out-of-the-box experiment says that his contraption could easily become available commercially. And for all those hippies out there, this machine is probably as eco-friendly you can get. The machine’s source is something that we all have and, unlike solar or wind turbines, it’s more predictable.

“So far the microbial fuel power stack that we have developed generates enough power to enable SMS messaging, web browsing and to make a brief phone call. Making a call on a mobile phone takes up the most energy but we will get to the place where we can charge a battery for longer periods,” says doctor Ioannis Ieropoulos from the University of the West of England. Now they just need to improve so that we can fully charge our phones and install one in our bathrooms.

This is not the first time someone has come up with a pee-powered mechanism. There’s this one story of four African girls creating electricity out of urine when their concept was presented at Maker Faire Africa last year. There have also been other curiously disgusting experiments of using cows’ urine. Disgusting or ingenious?