When wastewater companies are looking to use your urine, you’ve got to question – what’s up?
The problem is phosphates. They are looking to harvest the phosphates you pee out of your system.
As the BBC put it in a story, The world’s insatiable hunger for phosphorus, this is biggest looming crisis you have never heard of.
As they point out, since 1945, the world’s population has tripled to seven billion, and feeding that population has relied increasingly on artificial fertilizers. Phosphates, among the most important fertilizers, come from an ore that is in limited supply. It is mined, processed and spread on to our fields, whence it is ultimately washed away into the ocean.
So what will happen if one day we run out of the stuff?
“Crop yields will drop very, very spectacularly,” chemist Andrea Sella, of University College, London, told the BBC. “We will be in very, very deep trouble. We have to remember that the world’s population is growing steadily, and so demand for phosphorus is growing every year.”
World hunger on the horizon?
Apparently, farming without phosphates, according to mainstream agricultural practitioners, is not a realistic option.
Part of the problem is that phosphates are getting harder to mine – and the bad point of their use is we are poisoning the environment. But steps are being taken to try to find solutions.
Read the full story HERE.
