🌅 Recycling Urine for Better Fertilizer

SOURCE

The Piss Off

WHAT TO KNOW

• Scientists took the rivalry between Michigan and Michigan State from the football field to the urinal this past weekend, collaborating on a stadium-scale “peecycling” pilot program called The Piss Off that aims to create more sustainable fertilizer and educate people about the use of urine as a resource. Researchers collected 237 gallons of urine from fans attending the schools’ annual football game on Saturday—137 gallons from Michigan fans and 100 gallons from Michigan State supporters—that will be pasteurized and transformed into fertilizer for field trials in a collaborative study on the future of fertilizer.

WHY IT MATTERS

• The study will use a technology called urine diversion, which separates the human wastewater stream into its liquid and solid parts. Once separated, nutrients from each component can be isolated and processed for use in fertilizer pellets. Using urine-derived fertilizers can reduce the energy and water demand of traditional fertilizer production methods, though implementing the technology at large scale is still being tested. University of Michigan professor Nancy Love, who leads the project, says collecting just 4% of the urine flushed by people on the school’s campus could supply the 18,000 pounds of fertilizer used by the university each year.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• The universities also collaborated with the Rich Earth Institute, an organization dedicated to researching and advancing the use of human waste as a resource. The organization says 9 billion pounds of chemical fertilizer could be replaced with the urine produced by Americans each year.