When Kate Lucy saw a billboard around town inviting people to learn about something known as peecycling—which in Spanish could be pipíciclar—she was taken aback. “Why would someone pee in a jar and put it away?” she wondered. “It seems like a really crazy idea.”
She had to work the afternoon of the briefing, so she sent her husband, Jon Sellers, to appease his curiosity. He came home with a pitcher and a funnel.
Human urine, Sellers learned that night seven years ago, is packed with the same nutrients plants need to flourish. It has many more, in fact, than number two, with almost none of the pathogens. Farmers often apply these nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium—to crops in the form of chemical fertilizers. But that comes at a high environmental cost from fossil fuels and mining.
PLANTS FEED US, WE FEED THEM
The local nonprofit group running the session, the Rich Earth Institute, was working on a more sustainable approach: plants feed us, we feed them.
Efforts like this are increasingly urgent, experts say. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated fertilizer shortages around the world, driving farmers to despair and threatening food supplies. Scientists also warn that feeding a growing world population on a planet with climate change will only become more difficult.
Now, after more than 3,700 liters of donated urine, Lucy and her husband are part of a global movement trying to tackle a host of challenges — including food security, water scarcity and inadequate sanitation — without wasting our waste. .
At first, collecting his urine in a jug “was a bit tricky,” Lucy said. But she was a nurse and he was a preschool teacher; her urine did not frighten them. They went from leaving a couple of containers each week at one of the organizers’ house to installing large tanks in their own house that are professionally pumped.
TOILETS AND WASTE OF WATER
Now, Lucy feels a pang of regret when she uses a regular toilet. “We make this amazing fertilizer with our bodies, and then we flush it down the toilet with gallons of another precious resource,” she said. “It’s really wild to think about it.”
In fact, toilets are by far the largest source of water consumption in homes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Smarter management could save vast amounts of water, an urgent need as climate change exacerbates drought in places like the western United States.
It could also help solve another profound problem: inadequate sanitation systems — including leaking septic tanks and aging sewage infrastructure — overload rivers, lakes and coastal waters with nutrients from urine. The runoff of chemical fertilizers makes the situation worse. The result is the proliferation of algae that causes the massive death of animals and other plants.
A dramatic example is that of manatees in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon, which are starving after algal blooms caused by sewage destroyed the seagrasses they depend on.
“Urban and aquatic environments are terribly polluted, while rural environments are left without what they need,” said Rebecca Nelson, professor of plant sciences and global development at Cornell University.
CIRCULAR ECONOMY
Beyond the practical benefits of turning urine into fertilizer, there are those who are also drawn to a transformative idea behind the effort. By reusing something that used to be flushed down the toilet, they say, they are taking a revolutionary step in tackling biodiversity and climate crises: moving from a system that constantly mines and disposes, to a more circular economy that reuses and recycles in a continuous loop.
Chemical fertilizers are far from sustainable. The commercial production of ammonia, which is used primarily as a fertilizer, uses fossil fuels in two ways: as a source of hydrogen, needed for the chemical process that converts nitrogen from the air into ammonia, and also as a fuel to generate the intense heat that is generated. requires. According to one estimate, ammonia manufacturing contributes between one and two percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Phosphorus, another key nutrient, is mined from rocks, and the supply is dwindling.
THE NIGER EXPERIENCE
Across the Atlantic, in rural Niger, another study on urine fertilization was designed to address a more local problem: how could women farmers increase their poor crop yields? Women, often relegated to working the fields farthest from town, had difficulty finding or transporting enough animal manure to replenish their soils with nutrients. Chemical fertilizers were too expensive.
A team that included Aminou Ali, director of the Federation of Farmers’ Unions in Maradi, south-central Niger, surmised that the comparatively fertile fields closest to people’s homes were helped by people who relieved themselves. outside. They consulted doctors and religious leaders about whether it would be okay to try to fertilize with urine, and they got the green light.
“So we said, let’s test that hypothesis,” Ali recalls.
It was difficult to convince them, but the first year, 2013, they had 27 volunteers who collected urine in jars and applied it to the plants along with the manure from the animals; no one was willing to risk their crop on urine alone.
“The results we got were very fantastic,” says Ali. The following year, an additional 100 women fertilized with urine, and then 1,000. Her team’s research eventually found that urine, either with animal manure or alone, increased the yield of pearl millet, the staple crop, by 30 percent. approximately one hundred. This could mean more food for a family, or the possibility of selling their surplus in the market and obtaining money for other needs.
For some women it was taboo to use the word urine, so they renamed it oga, which means “chief” in the Igbo language.
To pasteurize the pee, it remains in the jar for at least two months before the farmer applies it, plant by plant. Urine is used at full strength if the soil is wet, or, if it is dry, it is diluted 1:1 with water so that the nutrients do not burn the crops. It is recommended to use handkerchiefs or masks to avoid the smell.
At first, the men were skeptical, says Hannatou Moussa, an agronomist working with Ali on the project. But the results spoke for themselves, and soon the men were saving their urine too.
“Now it has become a competition in the house,” said Moussa, with each parent competing for extra urine by trying to convince the children to use their container. Realizing the dynamic, some children have started asking for money or candy in exchange for their services, she added.
Children are not the only ones who see economic potential. Some enterprising young farmers have taken to collecting, storing and selling urine, Ali said, and the price has skyrocketed in the past two years, from about $1 for 25 liters to $6.
“You can go collect your urine as if you were collecting a gallon of water or a gallon of fuel,” Ali said.
AN IDEA THAT REQUIRES BIG CHANGES
So far, research on collecting and packaging nutrients from urine is not advanced enough to solve the current fertilizer crisis. Collecting urine on a large scale, for example, would require transformational changes in pipeline infrastructure.
In addition, there is the yuck factor to consider, which supporters of urine recycling face head-on.
“Human waste is already used to fertilize food found in the supermarket,” said Kim Nace, co-founder of the Rich Earth Institute, which collects the urine of about 200 volunteers in Vermont, including Lucy, for research and application in a handful of local farms.
The material that is already used is the treated remains of sewage plants, known as biosolids, which only contain a part of the nutrients in urine. It can also be contaminated by potentially harmful chemicals from household and industrial sources.
Urine, says Nace, is a much better option.
So every spring, in the hills surrounding the Rich Earth Institute, a truck with a license plate that reads “P4Farms” delivers the pasteurized merchandise.
“We see very strong results from urine,” says Noah Hoskins, who applies it to the hay fields at Dummerston’s Bunker Farm, where he raises cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys. He said that he wishes the Rich Earth Institute had more piss to give. “We are at a time where the price of chemical fertilizers has more than doubled and it really represents a part of our system that is out of our control,” he said.
OTHER SOLUTIONS FOR THE USE OF URINE
One of the biggest problems, however, is that it doesn’t make environmental or economic sense to truck urine, which is mostly water, from cities to remote farmlands.
To fix this, the Rich Earth Institute is working with the University of Michigan on a process to make a disinfected urine concentrate. And at Cornell, inspired by efforts in Niger, Nelson and his colleagues are trying to bind nutrients in urine to biochar, a kind of charcoal made, in this case, from feces. (It’s important not to forget poop, Nelson said, because it contributes carbon, another important part of healthy soil, along with small amounts of phosphorous, potassium and nitrogen.
Similar experiments and pilot projects are taking place around the world. In Cape Town, South Africa, scientists are looking for new ways to harvest nutrients from urine and reuse the rest. In Paris, authorities plan to install urine-diverting toilets in 600 new apartments, treat the urine and use it for the city’s nurseries and green spaces.
Karthish Manthiram, a professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, who doesn’t work with urine, said he was interested in seeing where these efforts lead. His own lab is trying to develop a clean process for synthesizing nitrogen from the air. “All of these methods need to be promoted because it’s too early to know which one is going to win,” Manthiram said.
What does seem certain, he said, is that the current methods of creating and supplying fertilizers will be replaced, because they are very unsustainable.
Pipicyclers in Vermont report a personal benefit from their work: a gratifying feeling from the thought that their body’s own nutrients help heal, rather than harm, the Earth.
“Hashtag OrinaElCambio,” said Julia Cavicchi, director of education at the Rich Earth Institute. “Puns aren’t the only thing that’s got me in this field,” she added, “but they’re certainly an added benefit.”
Source: All News.
