Pee Power attracted attention at Maker Faire in Mladá Boleslav

On Saturday, 27 September, Mladá Boleslav came alive with the Maker Faire festival, which brought a showcase of creativity, innovation and modern technologies to the city, and CXI TUL was part of it. The Pluhárna industrial cultural and social space was filled with enthusiasts of electronics, robotics, 3D printing, design, traditional crafts and science – we brought an exhibition of the Pee Power project.

The Pee Power project aroused enormous interest, with some people even coming just to see Pee Power in action. Visitors saw with their own eyes how bacteria can convert urine into electricity. What we normally perceive as waste is transformed into a valuable source of energy capable of powering lights, sensors and mobile phones thanks to special microbial fuel cells. Just as waste sorting was rejected as unnecessary fifty years ago, in a few decades we may begin to view wastewater as a valuable raw material.

The technology was brought here by Natasha Tait from the University of Southampton, who has been working on its development for a long time. Here at CXI TUL, Fatma Yalcinkaya is working on improving it, focusing on the development of more efficient membranes. Magda Nechanická, an expert in molecular biological methods and wastewater treatment, and Eva Doležalová, who is dedicated to popularising science, also explained the principle and possibilities of its use to visitors on site.

Maker Faire in Mladá Boleslav showed that innovation and new technologies with an emphasis on sustainability can attract a lot of attention. And we would like to thank the organisers for allowing us to contribute with Pee Power technology, because the energy for tomorrow's world may be hidden where no one expects it.