General Chat

If you think separating stuff for recycling is difficult - imagine in Medieval times, when you had to use one bucket for pee (collected to make saltpeter for gunpowder), and another for poo (for fertilizer) :-S

Everything was bio-degradable then.

True.
Now, apparently, our poo contains plastic :-(

It would, some of our food does.

Wasn't urine also used for fulling cloth?

Go back even earlier, and urine was used in laundries.

It was used as a mordant for dying.

I have seen on-line so I don't know how authentic it is, that people could sell their urine and some of the poorest didn't have a pot to piss in. The very poorest only had income from selling theirs and they were piss poor.

It does make sense but I have not yet found any authentication for it.

I've heard the same Sharron on various shows, but likewise can't prove it.

There was a repeat of Historical Cities the other day. That episode was about Norwich. The presenter, Prof Alice Roberts, was shown how to dye skeins of wool with Mader (sp). The Dyer said that human urine used to be the commonly used fixer, & added some to the mixture to be authentic.

Urine was used by Tanners for curing leather too.

Supposed to be good fertilizer for tomatoes too!

My brother used to P on his leeks at the allotment, won some prizes :-D

'Certain' members of my family pee on their compost heaps :-0

That will be 'certain' males!

Having said that, I was fed up (peed off?) with cats (generally un-neutered male cats) coming into my garden and attacking my cats, so I peed in a pot, and threw it over the garden - it did the trick :-D
It didn't bother my cats. When you live alone, quite often the bathroom door is left open when you nip in for a pee. Cat comes in, has a sniff of what's in the loo - and know it's you!