In recent years, human urine has been successfully used as an electrolyte and organic substrate in bioelectrochemical systems (BESs) mainly due of its unique properties. Urine contains organic compounds that can be utilised as a fuel for energy recovery in microbial fuel cells (MFCs) and it has high nutrient concentrations including nitrogen and phosphorous that can be concentrated and recovered in microbial electrosynthesis cells and microbial concentration cells. Moreover, human urine has high solution conductivity, which reduces the ohmic losses of these systems, improving BES output. This review describes the most recent advances in BESs utilising urine. Properties of neat human urine used in state‐of‐the‐art MFCs are described from basic to pilot‐scale and real implementation. Utilisation of urine in other bioelectrochemical systems for nutrient recovery is also discussed including proofs of concept to scale up systems.

In order to improve the potential of Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) as an applicable technology, the main challenge is to engineer practical systems for bioenergy production at larger scales and to test how the prototypes withstand the challenges occurring during the prolonged operation under constant feeding regime with real waste stream. This work presents the performance assessment of low-cost ceramic MFCs in the individual, stacked (modular) and modular cascade (3 modules) configurations during long term operation up to 19 months, utilising neat human urine as feedstock. During 1 year, the performance of the individual MFC units reached up to 1.56 mW (22.3 W/m3), exhibiting only 20% power loss on day 350 which was significantly smaller in comparison to conventional proton or cation exchange membranes. The stack module comprising 22 MFCs reached up to 21.4 mW (11.9 W/m3) showing power recovery to the initial output levels after 580 days, whereas the 3-module cascade reached up to 75 mW (13.9 W/m3) of power, showing 20% power loss on day 446. In terms of chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal, the 3-module cascade configuration achieved a cumulative reduction of >92%, which is higher than that observed in the single module (56%).