The Place to Pee
The Swiss bathroom manufacturer LAUFEN is participating with its urine-separating toilet save! in a showcase project to research a new treatment process for urine. The project is led by the Belgian company Hydrohm in cooperation with the Ghent University, the City of Ghent and LAUFEN.
The Place to Pee is the title of the installation that will be realized during the summer months in the sports and recreation park Blaarmeersen in Ghent. The focus is on one of the most everyday activities of our lives: to pee. Visitors to the park can become part of an experimental research project, whose main raw material is urine.
At first glance, The Place to Pee resembles a conventional toilet and sanitary facility used in public spaces and parks for temporary purposes. With the support of the City of Ghent and Farys, a container has been converted into a public toilet, and equipped with LAUFEN save! toilets and LAUFEN Lema urinals, as well as with Hydrohm’s Uridis treatment system, a high-tech facility for testing the new process for recycling urine into disinfecting flush water and fertilizers for agriculture.
With save!, the Swiss bathroom specialist LAUFEN produced a groundbreaking urine-separating WC in 2019, which has opened a new chapter in sustainable wastewater management. For the first time, a WC has been brought to market that can be used in the conventional way and does not require any change in behaviour. The design solution provides for urine separation directly at source, i.e. in the bowl itself. The preliminary work for this came from the Viennese design company EOOS, which worked together with the Swiss water research institute EAWAG in years of research and numerous field tests to develop a practical solution.
The Place to Pee is an example of how science, production and municipal government can cooperate in a meaningful way for an environmentally beneficial new process. Hydrohm is a science start-up (a spin-off from Ghent University, among others), the City of Ghent supports this project within its ambition to become a leader in cleantech and circular economy, and LAUFEN is a strong industrial partner with a long-term focus on sustainable and innovative solutions in the sanitary sector.
