Would you eat food that was fertilized by urine? We report on the mission to recycle pee for the good of the planet
Specialized toilet systems recover nitrogen and other nutrients from urine for use as fertilizers and other products.On Gotland, the largest island in Sweden, fresh water is scarce. At the same time, residents are battling dangerous amounts of pollution from agriculture and sewer systems that causes harmful algal blooms in the surrounding Baltic Sea. These can kill fish and make people ill.
The researchers aim to take urine reuse “beyond concept and into practice” on a large scale, says Prithvi Simha, a chemical-process engineer at the SLU and Sanitation360’s chief technology officer. The aim is to provide a model that regions around the world could follow. “The ambition is that everyone, everywhere, does this practice.”
Urine diversion and reuse is the type of “drastic reimagining of how we do human sanitation” that will become increasingly crucial as societies battle shortages in energy, water and raw materials for agriculture and industry, says biologist Lynn Broaddus, a sustainability consultant in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who is former president of the Water Environment Federation in Alexandria, Virginia, an association of water-quality professionals worldwide.
Still, the concept has remained niche, mostly limited to off-grid locales such as northern European eco-villages, rural outhouses and development projects in low-income settings. These concerns plagued the first large-scale use of urine-diversion toilets — a project in the 2000s in South Africa’s eThekwini municipality. After apartheid, the municipality’s boundaries suddenly expanded, causing authorities to take over responsibility for some poor rural areas where there was no toilet infrastructure and little water service, says Anthony Odili, who researches sanitation governance at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban.
A new design, however, could represent a breakthrough for urine diversion. Led by designer Harald Gründl and in collaboration with Larsen and others, in 2017, the Austrian design firm EOOS unveiled the Urine Trap. This removes the need for users to aim, and the urine-diverting function is almost invisible .It takes advantage of water’s tendency to cling to surfaces to direct urine down the front inner side of the toilet into a separate hole .
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