I’ve searched GQ and Google, and oddly enough I can’t find a simple answer to this fairly simple question.
Looking at my water filter label, it says it’ll clean up all sorts of nastiness, up to fifty-five gallons of it. So…
What say I’m trapped in a basement somewhere, with weeks to wait before I’m rescued. All I have is a couple of cases of something diuretic, like Mountain Dew, a Brita, and a couple of filters. I’ve got all the food I can eat, air I can breathe, and cable TV too just so long as I can figure out whether or not I can drink my own filtered pee.
(And no, I’m not that destitute. Yet. Thanks in advance.)
You can filter your urine through a Brita, but it will not render it into potable water. Better to to boil it and condense the steam into water if you are that concerned.
My WAG would be that you’d probably be able to pull out some of the minerals in the urine, but I don’t know about the actual urea or other nasty things that your body had just gotten rid of.
You could safely drink your urine after running it through a Brita filter. Of course, you could safely drink your urine after running it through a Melitta filter (although the stuff that came through the Britta filter would probably taste better) (this is testable!).
However, on a long term basis, you would die because neither the Brita filter nor the Melitta filter take out all the salts (the Britta takes out things unlikely to be there such as mercury and lead but it does not take out sodium). Eventually, after recycling the urine through the Britta and through your kidneys over and over you would be drinking a salty solution that would not support life. At some point you would need some fresh water.
Just because something is sterile does not mean it is safe to drink. DO NOT GET CONFUSED BY THIS. Saline solution for contacts is sterile, but, the glycerin that some have in it will throw your bowels into a toxic shock and you will be bolting to the toilet. As well as the other myriad of chemicals used for removing protein deposits, etc.
Sterile just means no bugs in it. Acid is sterile. Lye is sterile. Alcohol is sterile. But I sure as hell wouldn’t drink any of them. Nor saline solution for that matter.
The local consumer reporter ran cabbage soup through a Brita and it came out clear and didn’t smell like cabbage. Don’t know about the saline content, and I’d have to say filtered urine’s better than Mountain Dew any day.
“pretty sterile?” is like a little bit pregnant. Yes, urine is sterile, so feel free to pee all over your hypodermic needle before inoculating yourself.
Sterility really isn’t the issue. You can eat bacteria and viruses every day and not get sick (in fact, you do). Only a relatively small number of different types of viruses and bacteria are able to set up shop in a healthy person and make that person sick.
I ran a can of Diet Coke through a Britta filter and it did not remove all the color. Tasted a little different as if some of the Nutrasweet had been removed, but not all of it.
I had a similar experience with a regular Pepsi - it basically came out tasting like very, very weak cola. The color was unchanged, and it seemed to take a good deal longer to “drip through” than water ordinarily did.
I’ve long wanted to try running urine through a Brita - my girlfriend will be very pleased that now I don’t have to.
