URINE THAT'S USED TO CHARGE SMARTPHONE

It sounds outlandish, but earlier this year, at the Reinvent the Toilet Fair in New Delhi, India – co-hosted by the Indian Department of Biotechnology and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – the team exhibited a functional urinal that was able to charge a phone using just urine, a world first.

Scientists at Bristol Robotics Lab in the UK have also worked out how to turn urine into electricity.A collection of cylinders is filled with electro-active micro-organisms.
They feed off things they find in waste water and urine.

Electrons are created as a by-product, which can then be turned into electricity and used to charge phones and power some lights.The microbial fuel cells – or MFCs – Ieropoulos refers to contain live, naturally occurring microorganisms. These feed on the urine and produce electrons as a respiratory by-product. Electrodes in the MFCs facilitate the transfer of these electrons and create current when connected via a circuit.

"It's very simple. The down pipe from the urinal goes straight into the box which contains the microbial fuel cells, it's as simple as that," Yannis Ieropoulos, professor and director of the Bristol BioEnergy Center at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory,

Together with his team, he is now looking at ways of implementing the technology in the developing world, where the lack of both adequate sanitation and reliable energy supplies presents a huge challenge.

Sources:
https://info.uwe.ac.uk/news/uwenews/news.aspx?id=2598