Happy Nice Mall

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — Kate Lucy was surprised to see a poster in town inviting people to learn about something known as peecycling. “Why would a person pee in a jug and save it?” she wondered. “Sounds like a crazy idea.”

She had to work the evening of the debriefing, so she sent her husband, Jon Sellers, to assuage her curiosity. He came home with a jug and a funnel.

That night, seven years ago, Mr. Sellers learned that human urine is full of the nutrients plants need to thrive. In fact, it has much more than Number Two, with virtually no pathogens. Farmers typically apply these nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) to crops in the form of chemical fertilizers. But this comes with a high environmental cost from fossil fuels and mining.

The local non-profit group Rich Earth Institute, which hosted the session, was working on a more sustainable approach: Plants feed us, we feed them.

Efforts like this are becoming increasingly urgent, experts say. The Russian invasion of Ukraine exacerbated the worldwide fertilizer shortage. driving farmers into despair and threaten food supplies. Scientists also warn that feeding a growing global population in a world of climate change will get harder.

Now, after more than a thousand gallons of urine donated, Ms. Lucy and her husband are part of a global movement that seeks to solve a range of problems including food security, water shortages and inadequate sanitation by not wasting our waste.

Ms. Lucy said it was “a little watery” at first to collect her urine in a jug. But she was a nurse and she was a preschool teacher; pissing didn’t scare them. They’ve gone from leaving a few containers at an organizer’s home each week to installing large tanks professionally pumped into their own home.

Now, Miss Lucy feels great regret when she uses a regular toilet. “We make this wonderful fertilizer with our bodies and then we clean it up with gallons of another valuable resource,” said Ms. Lucy. “It’s really crazy to think about it.”

In fact, toilets are by far the largest source of water use in homes. According to the Environmental Protection Agency. Smarter management can save large amounts of water; this is an urgent need as climate change worsens droughts in places like the American West.

It can also help with another deep problem: Inadequate sanitation systems, including leaky septic tanks and aging wastewater infrastructure, overload rivers, lakes and coastal waters with nutrients from urine. Chemical fertilizer runoff worsens the situation. conclusion algal blooms triggering mass deaths in animals and other plants

In a dramatic example, Manatees in the Indian River Lagoon In Florida, they are starving after sewage-borne algae blooms destroy the seagrass on which they depend.

“Urban and aquatic environments are becoming horribly polluted, while rural environments are depleted of what they need,” said Rebecca Nelson, professor of plant science and global development at Cornell University.

Beyond the practical benefits of turning urine into fertilizer, some are also drawn to the transformative idea behind this effort. By reusing what was once discarded, they say, they are taking a revolutionary step towards tackling the biodiversity and climate crises: the move from a system that constantly extracts and discards, to a more circular economy that reuses and recycles in a continuous cycle.

Chemical fertilizers are far from sustainable. Fossil fuels are used in two ways in the commercial production of ammonia, which is mainly used for fertilizer purposes. First, as a source of hydrogen, which is necessary for the chemical process that converts nitrogen in the air into ammonia, and second, as fuel to generate the intense heat required. By one estimate, ammonia production 1-2 percent Phosphorus, another important nutrient of global carbon dioxide emissions, is extracted from rock with a dwindling supply.

Across the Atlantic, in rural Niger, another urine fertilization study was designed to address a more local issue: How can female farmers increase low crop yields? Often driven to the fields furthest from the city, the women struggled to find or transport enough manure to replenish their lands. Chemical fertilizers were very expensive.

A team, including Aminou Ali, director of the Maradi Federation of Farmers’ Unions in south-central Niger, estimated that the relatively fertile fields closer to people’s homes receive support from people who are relaxing outside. They consulted medical doctors and religious leaders about the appropriateness of trying urine fertilization and got the green light.

“So we thought we’d test this hypothesis,” Mr. Ali recalled.

It was a little convincing, but in the first year 2013 there were 27 volunteers who collected urine from jugs and applied it to plants along with animal manure; no one was willing to risk their harvest for pee alone.

“The results we got are so great,” said Ali. The following year, about 100 women were fertilizing, followed by 1,000 more. his team found at the end of the research that urine alone or with animal manure increases the yield of the main crop, pearl millet, by about 30 percent. This could mean more food for a family or the ability to sell their surplus at the market and get cash for other needs.

It was taboo for some women to use the word urine, so they renamed it oga, which means “boss” in Igbo.

To pasteurize the pee, the farmer remains in the jug for at least two months before applying, plant by plant. If the soil is wet, the urine is used at full strength, or if it is dry, it is diluted 1:1 with water so that the nutrients do not burn the crops. Scarves or masks are encouraged to help with the scent.

Hannatou Moussa, an agricultural engineer who worked with Mr. Ali on the project, said at first the men were skeptical. But the results spoke for themselves, and soon men began to hide their urine, too.

Dr. “It has become a competition in the house now,” Moussa said, with each parent competing for extra urine, trying to persuade the children to use their utensils. Adjusting to the dynamic, some children began demanding money or sweets in exchange for their services, he added.

It’s not just children who see the economic potential. Mr. Ali said some enterprising young farmers are starting to collect, store and sell urine, and the price has risen from $1 to $6 for 25 liters over the past few years.

“You can go and urinate as if you were getting a gallon of water or a gallon of fuel,” Ali said.

So far, research into collecting and packaging nutrients in the urine has not been advanced enough to address the current fertilizer crisis. For example, collecting urine at scale will require transformative changes in sanitary infrastructure.

Then there’s the ick factor that peecycling fans face directly.

“Human waste is already being used to fertilize food you find at the grocery store,” said Kim Nace, co-founder of the Rich Earth Institute, which collects the urine of nearly 200 volunteers in Vermont for research, including Ms. Lucy’s. and practice on a handful of local farms.

The material currently used is treated residues from wastewater plants, known as biosolids, which contain only a fraction of the nutrients in the urine. It can also be contaminated with potentially harmful chemicals from industrial sources and homes.

Ms. Nace claimed that urine was a much better option.

That’s why every spring, in the hills around the Rich Earth Institute, a truck that reads “P4Farms” delivers pasteurized products.

“We’re getting very strong results from the urine,” said Noah Hoskins, who applies it to the barn where he raises cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys at Bunker Farm in Dummerston. She said she wished the Rich World Institute had more pee to give. “We are at a time when the price of chemical fertilizers has more than doubled and truly represents a part of our system that is beyond our control.”

But one of the biggest problems is that it doesn’t make environmental or economic sense to move urine, which is mostly water, from cities to farmland far away.

To address this, the Rich Earth Institute is working with the University of Michigan on the process of making a sterilized pee concentrate. And at Cornell, inspired by efforts in Niger, Dr. Nelson and colleagues are trying to bind the nutrients of the urine to biochar, in this case a type of charcoal made from feces. (Dr. Nelson said it’s important not to forget poop, because it contributes to another important part of healthy soil, carbon, and to a lesser extent phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen.)

Similar experiments and pilot projects are underway around the world. Scientists find in Cape Town, South Africa new ways collecting nutrients from the urine and reuse the rest. In Paris, authorities plan to install pee diverting toilets in 600 new apartments, treat urine and use it in the city’s nurseries and green spaces.

Karthish Manthiram, a professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, said he’s interested in seeing where the efforts lead. His own lab is trying to develop a clean process for synthesizing nitrogen from the air. Dr. “These are all methods to follow because it’s too early to say right now what will win,” Manthiram said.

What is certain, he said, is that current methods of obtaining fertilizer will be modified as they are unsustainable.

Peecyclers in Vermont describe a personal benefit derived from their work: a sense of satisfaction by thinking that their own body’s nutrients help improve the world rather than hurt it.

“Hashtag PeeTheChange,” joked Julia Cavicchi, who leads education at the Rich Earth Institute. “Puns aren’t the only reason I’m in this field,” she added, “but it’s definitely an advantage.”