If both liver and kidneys are cleaning the blood, what’s the difference between them?
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The liver’s primary job is to make compounds in your blood take on a form that’s easier for the kidneys to excrete; in practice this means making them more soluble in water. All in all the liver is about making things you want more available to you, and making wastes easier to excrete. The liver filters blood coming from the intestines and the stomach, it’s the first pass which tries to balance everything in a way that works for your body. The liver breaks down large molecules into smaller and more easily absorbed ones as well, it does a LOT of different things really. The liver is also involved in producing bile salts, recycling compounds from our own dead cells and more.
Your kidneys can be thought of as the other end of that sort of job, the kidneys (ideally) filter your entire blood volume a couple of times an hour. One of their primary jobs involves regulating the concentration of electrolytes and water in the blood. The kidneys also remove the waste products we generate as a result of metabolizing proteins, it’s how we eliminate a lot of excess nitrogen. The kidneys can only do a large part of their job though because the liver is there to make compounds dissolve more easily in our body’s water.
Finally, although you didn’t ask, the last line of waste removal is through feces, where the wreckage of old blood cells, undigested food (and lots of the corpses of bacteria which live in our guts), old bile salts and whatever compounds the liver couldn’t make soluble enough in water to be eliminated by the urine.
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