Piss Soap is a regenerative soap made entirely out of human activity waste.
The idea of Piss Soap is to offer a new place for waste and discarded material that we load in trash bags and dispose of. The project offers a new cycle of life to waste, creating a circular economy and production that contributes actively to reducing our impact on the environment, while benefiting directly our urban surroundings. Piss soap challenges our understanding of the binary of dirtiness and cleanliness and invites the maker and user to realign their vision upon discarded matter.
Local
Netherlands
Amsterdam
Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
After a global pandemic and in the midst of an environmental crisis, 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. As Mary Douglas elaborated in Purity and Danger, dirt is only “matter out of place”. The idea of Piss Soap is to offer a new place for waste and discarded material that we load in trash bags and dispose of. The project offers a new cycle of life to waste, creating a circular economy and production that contributes actively to reducing our impact on the environment, while benefiting directly our urban surroundings.
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? Using only waste, Piss Soap invite the maker and user to realign their vision upon discarded matter. Are we constantly trashing matter that has the potential to be repurposed, recycled, and reused? Piss Soap proposes a deviant and yet conscious approach to tackle our waste issue, asking you to think twice next time you flush.
The project creates a cognitive shift in our consumerist attitude and reflect on what is wrong with our current system: our social programming to buy, use, discard, repeat …
Piss Soap takes a piss at capitalistic driven attitudes and proposes a new deviant and regenerative circular loop in our societies.
Circularity
Regeneration
Waste management and awareness
Ecodeviance
Citizen led movement
Piss Soap has a positive impact on our urban spaces and life. The raw materials (used cooking oil, wood ashes and human urine) are found in snack bars, public spaces, toilets, and are usually discarded. Piss Soap proposes a new circular ecology where both the public services and inhabitants can benefit from their own waste, while keeping our streets cleaned.
Right now, sustainability seems to be a light approach to counteract the environmental deterioration. As a result, we need to create regenerative processes that directly impact positively this tendency. Piss Soap have a strong ecological added value as it consumes and transforms waste into a product that will dissolve after its use.
Piss Soap is regenerative and can be easily implemented locally as its production requires very little energy and domestic appliances.
Piss Soap consumes roughly 10Kg of cooking oil, 15L of urine and 15Kg of wood ashes to produce 30Kg of golden soap. Besides, the project aims to serve as an educational model for the citizen in tangible ways to tackle the climate crisis and to re-learn to use what exists and surrounds us. It is intrinsically designed to regenerate both our attitude towards waste and our cities.
Piss Soap contributes to the Waste Framework Directive that requires EU countries to take measures to treat waste oils while protecting human health and their environment and the local goals of Amsterdam to become fully circular by 2050.
Piss Soap is a new and singular material in our society, that can be applied to many shapes and supports. The current intentions behind it are to start producing local Piss Soap and adapt its form to the context it is the most needed. Until now, it takes the shapes of soap bars, liquid soaps, laundry detergents, and can be developed in pleasant shapes facilitating, both the connection with the audience and its use, informed by ergonomic experiences.
Piss Soap carries a strong social stigma by its waste composition, therefore the quality of the experience is crucial to the development of the concept. This material and product might not carry the best qualities compare to non-regenerative alternatives currently available on the market. However, its environmental impact and the story behind the urgency for this product can seduce audiences to start using it.
Moreover, I am currently researching how to enhance the user experience in making its use, a more pleasureful moment. Soap is a product that entangle more than purely aesthetic qualities and call for diverse senses such as smell and touch. I am developing a new material research to elevate its smell and increase its foaming capacities. To achieve such, I am investigating the creation of scented essential oils made out of organic waste ( food waste from local market and native plants), found in urban environment. Both these elements seem crucial to add to the quality of experience and seduce local partners and users.
Piss soap is not only a product, it is also a process. I intend to share the recipe and process publicly, allowing everyone to reproduce it at home. Using domestic appliances and their wastes, each household could gain the knowledge to process part of their discarded materials on their own and create their personal circular loop, domiciliary.
Piss Soap aims to offer equal opportunity in matter of access and production while creating a process open for public participation. Through the collecting and transforming points, the cold Piss Soap making process will be taught to the local population via workshops. This sharing of knowledge is open to all ages, social levels, genders and cultures that are present in our cities.
Furthermore, the local inhabitants that would collect waste materials would be able to receive Piss Soap for their personal uses. The intention behind Piss Soap is to create a strong social awareness concerning our wastes and understand the potential that lays around us to counter climate change.
The project illustrates very simply how can a shift in mind, drastically contribute to local and global problems. Piss Soap’s ethics are deeply aligned with climate and social resistance, where nature and all its living being must be supported and cared for.
Piss Soap is ecological and deviant, and, rather than opting for industrial extraction, it harvests what nature offers us. It advocates for a local approach to fight climate crisis. It offers a simple solution and create an ecological impact directly linked to a tangible local result.
Piss Soap can be an agent of change and answer some urgent needs we have to address in our climate crisis. It pushes us to review our cultural consumerists behaviour and aims, through creativity, to change our habits by subverting our perspective upon waste.
Piss Soap invites the citizen to engage directly with their own waste management without creating individual ecological guilt. The process is simple, affordable and create a new social engagement where each inhabitants is empowered to create ecological change on their local scale.
In the future, Piss Soap could be available via diverse platforms such as the european City Hub program and other institutions participating actively in the european Green Deal.
Piss Soap is starting to be implemented in the local landscape of Amsterdam since 2017.
As a enterprise, it weaves a network of active associations, citizens and local entities that are all dedicated to climate justice and transition.
As a material, I present Piss Soap in public events where the visitors have the chance to experience the outcome and share their opinion. The general public tends to find it both attractive and repulsing at the same time, which in any case, lead to interesting conversations about our vision upon discarded matter.
As a social prompt, it received the trust and relevance from citizen movements. It helps building an engaged local community that will ultimately lead to rethink the policies in our city.
As a new economy, Piss Soap offers a good opportunity to rethink our recycling industries.
As an ecodeviant matter, Piss Soap contribute to a bottom-up social change towards a conscious future. By its simplicity, accessibility and universality, Piss Soap spreads rhizomatically, connecting, regenerating and benefitting our environment and its inhabitants.
Piss Soap was, until recently, a personal project. I have led all material researches and I was at the time the only person dedicating their life to make soap out of waste.
Recently, facing the need for more raw material, I connected with various like-minded institutions and extended the circle of Piss Soap.
The project is now collaborative and connects locally several partners.
Piss Soap’s associates include researchers from the University of Amsterdam ( Anthropology department) to discuss the ethics and social implementation of such project.
Additionally, Piss Soap partnered with diverse institutions to source and recycle their wastes.
In Amsterdam, the school canteen of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and restaurant Elixer provide the project with used cooking oil. Mediamatic offers the wood ashes from their pizza oven. Taste Before You Waste and a juice stand on the Dappermarkt agreed to dispense various food wastes that can be added to the composition of the soap, such as orange peel or various aromatics.
I collect urine in the shape of deviant encounters in night venues in Amsterdam. After participating in ADE, Club Church agreed to let me facilitate indefinitely such collection in their space.
I am currently in discussion with various new potential partners such as De Ceuvel (Amsterdam, NL), Upcyclecentrum (Almere, NL), Make The City Green ( Amsterdam, NL) and CirculArts (NEB Prizes 2022 Finalist, Rotterdam, NL).
Lastly, I started an engaged conversation with local policy makers of the municipality on finding ways to implement and support circular projects that regenerate our urban landscape in Amsterdam.
Piss Soap is directly connected to my artistic practice of Ecodeviance. It participates actively in deconditioning the vision we hold upon wastes in our western society, and more globally upon Disgust. In my practice, I investigate Disgust as an emotion that separates us from the unknown, the stranger, the abnormal. I wish to recondition our vision of revulsion towards a healthier and more accepting discourse. Understanding the abundance that resides in material like used cooking oil or body fluids, can help us in being more tolerant towards our bodies, each other’s, and counteract discourses of rejection.
Over the 5 years of research that led to the implementation of Piss Soap, I developed methodologies and processes that harvests the abundance that surrounds us and embraces dissident possibilities, away from social conditioning, all towards an ecological future. It helps thinking our world through the lens of care, regeneration and fertile disobedience.
Capitalising on wastes justifies their presence in our society. Therefore, Piss soap aims to become a movement. Piss Soap looks ahead on the long term and aims to propose innovative methodologies outside of late-capitalism ideologies. Piss Soap directly reverses our human impact on our urban environment. Its process and materials are entirely circular, leaving no place for byproduct waste. Further more, it is a distributed bottom-up concept with open-source recipe and process.
Piss Soap is unique in its experimental approach and production, and absolutely inexistent on the current market. Despite being made out of “gruesome” elements, Piss Soap is safe and hygienic. It enhances the connection between local communities and their waste management in new ways, never experimented before. Piss Soap proposes a radical perspective upon wellness, by sensabilizing citizens to the bounties that resides within their wastes. The project represents an enormous added value by its circularity and regenerative impact on our urban environments. Piss Soap contributes to local economy, develop a new industry of waste disposal and represents a new cycle of life that doesn't exists in our society.
Additionally, Piss Soap inscribes itself in new contemporary movements of re-thinking the disposal of human waste. In combination with projects such as Broodje Poep (NL), creating biobased land fertiliser from faecal matter or OmiFlo (KE), a hydroponic system that turns wastewater into lush greenery, Piss Soap partakes in the creation of human waste circular enterprises on a global scale.
The project has the potential to tremendously grow and develop in connection with the extending implementation of water supply and sustainable sanitations in form of UDDTs (urine diversion dehydration toilets). It participates actively in its singular way to the program Zero Pollution Action Plan and Toxic Free Circular Economy in Europe.
The recipe and methodology of making Piss Soap are open source and directly available for any european citizen to start their own production. The gathering of material and production of the Piss Soap can be easily locally implemented and redistributed. Similarly to the project of Precious Plastic (NL), Piss Soap can be carried through by creating small scale recycling and transforming points, locally present to facilitate local waste management. This structure can be reproduced, reinvented and recreated in many neighbourhoods and benefit diverse communities while contributing to reducing their wastes. Furthermore, in collaboration with municipalities, the raw waste materials can be collected from waste disposal facilities, participating in the circular economy of the cities.
Additionally, the project of Nomadic Piss Soap Workshops (currently in development) aims to visit various cities in Europe to teach and adapt the recipe to each localities, engaging the residents of each neighbourhood. Starting in Vienna in September 2023, at Gleis21 (NEB Prizes 2022 Winner), this series of workshops is determine to create a network of active ecodeviant practitioners and slowly make Piss Soap a european circular phenomena.
Have you ever heard about a material that is entirely made out of waste and simply disappear after its use? Well that was the challenge I set myself when I started investigating Piss Soap.
As an artist and designer, I consider my role to bring new propositions to our world through creativity and inspire many to choose the path of what is right over what is easy for our future. That is why Piss Soap is both a socio-cognitive challenge for our society and an extremely tangible and accessible solution to local waste.
Piss Soap intends to push the climate transition to a higher speed. Circularity can not consume waste to create more waste. When our urban landscapes are creating, amassing and even exporting wastes, it is our role to counter such trend. Piss Soap takes a stand for regenerative approaches in our cities and is dedicated to act to reverse our human impact.
Lastly, Beauty and soap industries are currently changing their compositions and recipes to become more sustainable, often making such products less affordable. Piss Soap proposes a radical and yet reasonable perspective upon wellness and hygiene. Piss Soap suggest an original approach to recycling cooking oils, without competing with the biofuel industry. It combines various wastes that can be found in domestic environments, offering the potential for global development of local initiatives.
