Have you ever stopped to think about how much pee passed through the water you consume? An article published on the Australian blog Core Economics presents a formula that solved this question and arrived at the following answer: probably every glass of water you drink received urine from at least 10 living beings.
As is known, the entire water resource on Earth is practically the same in the last five billion years. So it stands to reason that the water you’re ingesting has passed through all sorts of creatures – including humans – in all this time.
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According to the blog, the equation to get the pee ratio is a bit complicated, but not impossible to do: “total urine” divided by “total water” = “urination rate times the vertebrate biomass that ever lived” divided by “total water” = “average vertebrate biomass” times “pee rate per year” times “lifetime of vertebrates” divided by “total water”.
As the author of the article, Paul Frijters, visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom, shows, the atoms present, on average, in each water molecule may already have been found in 10 different urines – and that is is a “conservative” estimate.
For him, the “most likely” is that each glass of water has already received the pee of about 25 living beings. Frijters takes the opportunity to detail how this proportion would take place: “water was pissed about 10 times by a fish, a mammal pissed about twice and other forms of piss are equivalent to 13 times. Only one drop was monkey pee.”
It is worth mentioning that the professor used as a basis for the calculation the presence of 1.386 billion km³ of water resources on the planet. As for urine, he took into account the average of 800 km³ of pee produced by each human being during their lifetime, which means that only one millionth of the atoms in the water molecule would be bound to our species. So we’re drinking reconstituted urine, but not much of what we produce ourselves.
Despite this curious calculation, the water in our home receives chemicals during the treatment process, including chlorine and fluorine. Even so, consumption directly from the tap is not recommended, as it is not known what contaminants may exist on the path from the sanitation company’s reservoir to your home.
Speaking of treated water, did you know that only 84% of Brazilians have access to it? There are almost 35 million people in our country without access to basic sanitation, according to the national NGO Trata Brasil. In addition, according to the entity, the average water consumption in the country is 152.1 liters per inhabitant per day – well above the United Nations recommendation, which is 110 liters/day.
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