Trialling urine diversion in Australia: technical and social learnings

Abstract

This paper discusses a urine diversion (UD) trial implemented within the institutional setting of the University of Technology Sydney that sought to identify key issues for public UD and reuse systems at scale in the Australian urban context. The trial was novel in its transdisciplinary action research approach, that included consideration of urine diverting toilets (UDTs) as socio-technical systems where interactions between users' practices and perceptions and the performance of the technology were explored. While the study explored a broad range of issues that included urine transport, reuse, and regulations, amongst others, the boundary of the work presented in this paper is the practicalities of UD practice within public urban buildings. Urine volume per urinal use, an important metric for sizing tanks for collecting urine from waterless urinal systems in commercial buildings, was also estimated. The project concluded that current UDTs are unsuitable to public/commercial spaces, but waterless urinals have a key role.