One wouldn’t consider Battleboro, a picturesque town in Vermont, the host of a sporting event. “Piss Off” contest. Every year, around 200 people compare who has collected most urine to win the cup with a gold plating. To fertilize crops.
The event is organized by the Rich Earth Institute, a local non-profit that pasteurizes donated pee and supplies it to farms to use instead of synthetic fertilizer. Urine IncludesAll of these nutrients, which are essential for plants to grow, are often flushed away.
That’s why the institute has retrofitted most of its volunteers’ homes with toilets that separate urine at the source so it can later be pumped out and transported where it’s needed.
“[The volunteers] take a lot of pride in what they’re doing,” said Abraham Noe-Hays, the organization’s research director. “They see it a way to recycle.”
Nearly 200 volunteers donate their urine for fertilization on local farms.
Are pee and pee more resilient than other food systems?
Turning pee into fertilizer isn’t restricted to this community. Rich Earth’s spinoff company is working on a system that can also be used in buildings to expand the program.
Further afield: Countries like Sweden, France, Germany, South Africa and Australia other organizations are working to repurpose human waste in a bid to reduce reliance on commercial fertilizers, which have their own setOf environmental and economic challenges.
Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers pollute groundwater and are a significant driver of Climate change Production and use of such fertilizers accounts for 2.4% of global emissions, According to a 2021 study.
Global phosphorus reserves also are shrinking. And farmers around the world have been facing shortages and Soaring pricesSince Russia invaded Ukraine, it has been a major exporter of fertilizer.
Scientists have always pointed to resources in human waste to reduce import dependency, says Prithvi SIMHA, a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
How can we grow food when there is a shock in the supply chain? He stated that urine recycling can help increase the resilience of our food system.
Sanitation 360 has developed a way for pee to be turned into dry fertilizer
According to Simha, around a third of all nitrogen and phosphorus used in agriculture worldwide could be replaced by nutrients obtained from urine. This percentage increases dramatically in countries such as Uganda and Ethiopia where there are large populations to provide urine. However, synthetic fertilizer costs are prohibitive.
From liquid gold to dry fertiler
Simha is one of the researchers who created a way to convert pee into a smaller quantity of solid fertilizer. It behaves and looks just like the synthetic pellets that most farmers currently use.
Sanitation 360, an SLU spin-off, is based in Gotland and equips toilets using cassettes that alkalize urine. The process allows the nutrients it contains to remain stable while a fan evaporates the water, leaving behind a dry powder.
“There’s a lot more complex chemistry behind how this happened, but it’s very simple to implement. Simha stated that it works well in both the Global North as the Global South.
Sanitation 360 has been partnering with a company that rents mobile toilets. It scaled up its urine collection from 1,500 liters (396 gallons) to 25,000 liters and next year it is aiming for 250,000 liters. It donates the fertilizer from what it collects to local organizations. Barley cropsSimha, after tasting the beer, stated that it was “exactly like any other beer of its kind”.
In Malmo, Sweden, a Laufen toilet has been installed that uses Sanitation 360’s technology for drying the urine.
If urine fertilizer wants to become mainstream, it must be able to compete with synthetic fertilizers. That involves getting it certified by national regulators as some parts of the world still label urine separated at source as sewage. It also means making the equipment and technologies widely available. The key piece of the puzzle is the urine diverting toilet.
Separate before recycling
If we want pee to be used as fertilizer, it should be separated from our feces. separate recyclables like plasticFrom our other trash.
The flush and dry types of urine diverting toilets are available. They collect the liquid waste in a special basin located at the front of your toilet bowl. These models were actually first developed as a way to reduce water pollution. Although urine makes up only 1% of the waste water in European treatment facilities, it is one of many main sources of nutrients such as nitrogen. pollute and damage rivers and lakes.
Urine diverting toilets can be used to collect pee at the source
Tove Larsen, a senior scientist at Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, states that it is easy to repurpose the urine from the source into fertilizer.
She stated that if you don’t extract gold from your waste water, instead of recycling it into industry you’re just throwing it out.”
A developing technology
The main problem with urine diverting is that it has not been able to be done. toilets has been that they are considered impractical to use and produce, according to Larsen. She says that a new model, developed and manufactured by Eawag and Laufen in Switzerland, could change all of that.
This model uses the “teapot effect.” The plateau at the front of the bowl is manufactured in a way that allows the pee to trickle into a separate hole similar to when tea trickles down the outside of the pot when poured at an awkward angle.
The flush can also be used to clean the plateau using minimal water. Just enough to remove any odors. Larsen says the main advantage of these new models are that they can be used and made like any other ceramic toilet.
They are currently only available for a small number of buildings in the world. However, scientists believe that eventually, recycling liquid gold will be as easy as sitting down and peeing.
Edited By: Jennifer Collins
