00:00Human urines contain everything which is useful for our food production.
00:06Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, as well as micronutrients.
00:11The biggest challenge is how do we collect it in a cost-effective way
00:15and convert it into a form that farmers can use effectively.
00:20The NICE Hub aims to collect, recover and recycle nutrients from waste
00:27and convert them into useful fertiliser.
00:33We use more energy to produce nitrogen for agriculture
00:37than all the planes burning aviation fuel globally.
00:40It makes sense that we do something to change that.
00:44Together with Southeast Water, we have developed the AS NICE Lab,
00:49which is the mobile trailer system.
00:52We collect the urine at the behind the tank
00:56and then we just feed our urine to this membrane bioreactor system.
01:04Then we have also pumping system and then pipeline.
01:09So finally, we produce the fertiliser from this pipeline
01:13and then we can apply directly for fertigation.
01:16The next steps is basically moving forward to apply that fertiliser.
01:21So now we are testing more and more how we can use this one in the city environment.
01:28We've been working with the NICE project team since 2019 on testing that end product,
01:34the bit that literally gets flushed down the drain and turned into a fertiliser product
01:38to deploy in our nursery operations.
01:40Millions of people across the globe that are just flushing urine down the toilets every day
01:44means that we've got this continual, sustainable, replaceable source of fertilisers
01:49that if it can be harvested and concentrated,
01:52means we've got ready access to a wonderful source of fertiliser that can be used for growing plants.
01:57Currently, waste management principle is just treat the waste and you dispose it.
02:04If we can do the source separation of the urine and remove the nitrogen load,
02:10we obviously lower the greenhouse gas emission.
02:13It really transforms the way we treat our wastes.
02:19One of the key research priorities for Southeast Water is about transforming the water utility
02:26with the circular economy principles.
02:28So that's the reason we have established our partnership with UTS.
02:32We have initially developed a small-scale bioreactor.
02:38And then, based on our promising region, we have developed a full-scale.
02:44UTS is the only one university.
02:48We have a urine divergent system in Australia.
02:52Social science, plant science, environmental engineering, hydraulics.
02:57There are so many different disciplines that are working as one unit
03:01to produce something which I think is very important for the future.
03:05We can contribute a lot of environmental, economic and climate change actions.
03:12That's the big picture of our lithium technology.
