Remember the uproar Ke$ha created when she drank her own urine on the 2013 MTV docu-series, Ke$ha: My Crazy Beautiful Life? Unlike brushing her teeth with a bottle of Jack, in this case the eccentric-outfit-and bright-eye-shadow-sporting pop star may have actually been onto something. As Coen van der Kroon writes in his book, Golden Fountain: The Complete Guide to Urine (yes, it’s a real book), “By drinking your own urine and massaging yourself with it, you can remain or become perfectly healthy and can recover from the simplest of ailments to the most serious of illnesses.” In fact, for centuries the uses for human urine have been well regarded, and it has been thought to have special healing properties.
Now, we’re not about to go and recommend that you replace the bubbly or your morning OJ with a certain other yellow liquid, but it turns out that the stuff you’ve been flushing actually does serve some other purposes. Here are 10 uses for human urine that will make you think before you tinkle.
1. You can get your laundry clean.
These days laundry detergent comes in every scent, type, and color. In ancient Rome that wasn’t the case. Instead, fullones, the ancient washers used different alkalis and ammonia-containing agents—two of which were human and dog urine—to remove dirt from garments. They would leave containers on street corners for people to urinate in and take them away once they were full.