What are the common uses of the urine collected in rural areas?

Summary: It is common in villages to see people collecting urine. What is this urine used for?

When I was in high school, although the school had already installed flush toilets, several buckets were placed in the boys' toilets to collect urine, and periodically an old man would drive a motorized three-wheeler and pour these urine buckets together into a large white tank on the vehicle and haul them away. As a child with little knowledge, I thought this urine was only used to extract chemical fertilizer.

Urine can be used to make fertilizer, make gunpowder, and also make medicine.

Only now do I know that this pale yellow urine, though foul-smelling, is actually a precious resource, especially in the eyes of biology experts. The main component of urine is water, with the rest being urea, uric acid, creatinine, ammonia and other non-protein nitrogen compounds, various inorganic salts and urease, while the urine of pregnant women also contains human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), also called chorionic gonadotropin.

Urine can be used as fertilizer.

Urine contains a large amount of nitrogen, an important element for plant fertilizer, and early urea fertilizer was extracted from urine. However, urine has too high a salt content and cannot be applied directly to fields, as it will cause seedling burn. It needs to first undergo sealed fermentation for about one week, then be diluted with 80% water before use.

Urine can be used to make gunpowder.

Because urine contains nitrate salts, when mixed with charcoal and sulfur it can be made into gunpowder. In former wartime years, while men fought bravely at the front, women would collect urine and put it into jars to precipitate nitrate salts for making gunpowder. However, the nitrate salt content in urine is very low, so this method was abandoned long ago.

Finally, urine can be used to make medicine.

This is currently the most widespread and also the most important use of urine extraction. A thrombolytic drug called urokinase can be extracted from urine. Urokinase is a drug for treating cardiovascular diseases and can be used to treat fresh thromboembolic diseases such as cerebral thrombosis and acute myocardial infarction. And because of pregnancy, pregnant women secrete excessive sex hormones, namely human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), also called chorionic gonadotropin, whose levels are far higher than normal female values, so pharmaceutical factories collect the urine of pregnant women, extract it, and make drugs to treat many illnesses or make test strips (that is, early pregnancy test strips).

Why do businesses pay to collect the urine of pregnant women?

This is because chorionic gonadotropin can only be extracted from the urine of pregnant women, and people still have prejudices about collecting urine, believing that urine is just waste excreted from the body with no value, and that it smells bad and is unclean. So businesses pay to encourage pregnant women to collect urine. To change this situation, it is necessary to popularize these small scientific facts among the public and place urine collection equipment in public toilets.

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