Piss Soap
Useful information
- Team members
- Arthur Guilleminot
- Country
- Netherlands
- Keywords
- piss soap sustainable zero impact recycling no waste
Short Description
Piss soap is a soap made entirely out of human activities' wastes, included urine.
Detailed Description
Piss Soap
In a time of global pandemic, the conception of what is disgusting is narrowing to be more restrictive than ever. The constant fear and anxiety related to contamination promotes a more prude society, concerning the notion of filth and disgust.
Piss soap challenges our understanding of the binary of dirtiness and cleanliness. Can an object be made out of gruesome material but be beneficial to our health? Where lays the line for our mental contamination?
Piss soap is made entirely out of human activity waste materials, including human urine.
All the raw materials needed to make piss soap can be collected on a local scale of a city and then redistributed for cleaning of roads, streets or other public spaces. Individuals and inhabitants would be invited to gather and bring their own raw material to also receive piss soap for their personal use.
Project Details
- Does your design take social and cultural challenges and human wellbeing into consideration?
Piss soap is a challenging social product. By presenting itself as a product made out of gruesome elements, the social stigma to bring this product to use is important. However, by taking the shape of a soap, hygienic and cleansing, it is impossible to deny its "cleanliness" nor its practical and sustainable use. Piss soap is a solution for city wastes but more importantly, challenges the inhabitants to decolonize their vision upon disgust.
- Does your design support sustainable production, embodying circular or regenerative design practices?
Piss soap is a soap made out of wood ashes, used frying oil and urine. All these materials can be easily gathered locally (from a urban environment). Using only waste and very little energy to create the piss soap makes this material ideal for a cleaning product. The gathering of material and production of the piss soap can be easily locally implemented and redistributed to the public cleaning services as well as the inhabitants.
- Does your design use principles of distribution and open source?
Piss soap is not a product but a process. It is open for everyone to reproduce at home. To facilitate its implementation locally, a point of collection and transformation could locally be installed. The cold piss soap making process could be taught to the local population in order for everyone to produce their own, at home, with their own wastes. Furthermore, the local inhabitants that would collect waste materials would be able to receive piss soap for their personal uses.
- Does your design promote awareness of responsible design and consumption?
Piss soap has a positive impact in our cities. Only using waste as raw material, it would allow to transform in a creative and useful way, wastes that our city congregate. Transforming such wastes into a sanitary product that can be used in the local economy and wellness for its ecology represent an responsible added value project.
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