Pioneers of 'pee-cycling' tout urine's value

BRATTLEBORO - “We’re all potty-trained,” Kim Nace reminded a small gathering of adults at the Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro earlier this fall.

But, the nonprofit’s director added, humans can and should up their game.

Hundreds of urine donors in the area are making an effort.

The prospect of clean water downstream, achieved cheaply — is reason enough to donate your pee to science, Nace said.

Furthermore, research at the institute, partially funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, demonstrates that pasteurized urine is a first-class fertilizer on nearby hayfields.

“Why waste it?” asked Nace, 57, who has transformed a garage into the institute's lab, workshop and processing center.

The conversation paused as a car pulled into the driveway. Nace recognized the driver — one of the regulars.

Tom Miller, 62, stepped out, toting a 5-gallon plastic jug filled with an amber-colored liquid.

This is three or four weeks’ worth,” he volunteered. “Not all, of it, of course. When I’m away from home, I don’t hold it ’til I get back.”

Miller walked his jug to the self-serve pumping station. A wand, when dipped into the vessel, activated a small motor, and Miller’s pee was drawn into a much larger storage tank sitting nearby.

Inside the garage, a reverse-osmosis filtration pump — similar to those used in the maple syrup industry — concentrates urine, readying some of it for pasteurization and distribution to several local farms.

Miller’s contribution is part of the approximately 5,000 gallons the institute collects annually.

'P' and 'Pee'

In earlier centuries, sanitation and agriculture played a complementary role in human ecology, Nace said, and some so-called “developing” rural societies haven’t forgotten the lesson.

The rest of us have grown accustomed to flushing down pee after pee with gallon after gallon of treated water.

Rich Earth Institute, which Nace co-founded with Abraham Noe-Hays in 2012, studies community-scale “pee-cycling” as a viable — even attractive — alternative to what we have come to accept as our waste stream.

It’s the nation’s first such pilot program.

Is urine diversion far-fetched?

No more than our separation of aluminum, glass and paper from landfill-bound trash, said Noe-Hays, 39, the institute's research director.

In the case of urine, the harvested resources are phosphorus and nitrogen.

Both of these elements are critical to healthy plant growth, and figure prominently in garden and crop fertilizers.

Livestock excreta is rich in “P” and “N,” and is typically spread on fields.

The phosphorus and nitrogen contained in an average adult’s daily urine output is enough to fertilize the production of a loaf of wheat bread, Noe-Hays said.

“The farmers around here didn’t even blink when we asked if they’d apply urine to their fields,” he continued. “They said, ‘Sure — it’s animal manure: It does what all other animal manure does.’ ”

In 2014, hayfields fertilized with the institute’s sanitized urine delivered yields comparable to those enriched with commercial fertilizer.

What would Julius Caesar do?

As with other animal manure, humans’ cast-off nutrients often bypass the critical step of re-incorporation into soil.

Notoriously, “waste” nutrients have become overabundant in lakes and ponds, where they fuel growth of algae and cyanobacteria — to the detriment of other organisms.

Taxpayers foot the bill for a remedy.

Prevention is typically cheaper than the cure — but still, municipal treatment plants spend millions of dollars to remove phosphorus and nitrogen that streams through sewer pipes.

Aging infrastructure, increased urban development and more severe storms in recent years have spotlighted the deficiencies of our wastewater status quo, Noe-Hays said.

He tossed out several compelling reasons why dealing with pee is a priority:

Urine typically makes up less than one percent our wastewater volume, yet accounts for more than half of a system’s nitrogen and phosphorus load.

Our daily output of urine contains considerably more nitrogen and phosphorus — than our feces.

Pee from healthy adults is virtually pathogen-free. It contains very few heavy metals. It’s relatively safe to handle, even by amateurs. The same can’t be said for poop.

Some of the residual pharmaceuticals we excrete ends up in our urine. Diverting and removing potentially harmful remnants of our chemical intake is much easier before urine is diluted and flushed into a bigger reservoir of sewage.

To that last point: For the past two years Rich Earth Institute has been collaborating with several universities on research to determine how the residues of our drugs pass through soil and into plant tissue.

The study, funded by the EPA, found only negligible traces of pharmaceuticals in the food crops they tested.

Caffeine, often flagged as an indicator for other drugs, weighed in on the light side.

Noe-Hays couldn’t resist a comparison: “If Julius Caesar were still alive and had eaten a pound of urine-fertilized lettuce from our study every day of his life — about 2,000 years, say — by now he would have ingested about the caffeine equivalent of two mugs of coffee.”

Pharmaceutical compounds will likely continue to challenge scientists’ ability to detect and remove them, he added — but doesn’t it make sense to head them off at the pass?

Ready for the mainstream

Nace, who has worked as an educator in the U.S. and in India, is keen to establish a clear, easy low-tech path to pee-cycling.

Her toilet at home, to work effectively, requires both men and women to sit down when taking a leak. A partition in the bowl sends urine down a pipe to a storage tank in the basement. The larger, more familiar hole, delivers solid loads to a composter.

A newly formulated “green” code for plumbers will help spur more such facilities, she predicts. The institute’s work already has endorsements from a local septic hauling company, the Windham Regional Planning Commission and the Brattleboro Department of Public Works.

Nace-the-educator asks us to examine solutions that are already in place: Hikers pee in the woods; farmers and gardeners routinely pee in their compost piles.

Waterless urinals in portable chemical toilets and higher-end highway pull-offs and nature centers are barking up the right tree with urine diversion, she adds, but “are missing that final step” — of harvesting the flow and returning it to good use.

A $10 startup kit she assembles for volunteers makes it easy to translate theory into practice. Each donor receives a white, 5-gallon jug and a fabric “pee-cozy” to hide its contents from people with delicate sensibilities.

For men, a large, bright red funnel, tightly screwed to the jug, is the target.

Women and girls are issued a “nun’s cap” receptacle that fits into a normal toilet — and can be poured into the container.

A ping-pong ball at the base of the funnel serves as a shut-off valve. In the presence of pee, the ball floats. When dry, the ball sinks, sealing the reservoir.

In an academic paper released earlier this year, Nace and Noe-Hays emphasize that the gizmo is “not intended as a permanent or mainstream method for urine collection,” but is convenient, effective, virtually odor-free and “very popular with both male and female participants.”

The group’s support for volunteers currently tops out with a 55-gallon storage drum “for families and high-volume producers” — and includes a periodic pump-out service.

A further scaling up of collection and research would be easy, Nace said, but would require more than modest EPA and USDA grants.

Aside from questing for financial support, Nace is pushing for a modest shift in our thinking.

Consider the source of our food and our health, Nace tell us: “It’s arrogant to be peeing in water.”

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This story first appeared online Friday, Nov.20, 2015.

Contact Joel Banner Baird at (802) 660-1843 or joelbaird@freepressmedia.com;Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/vtgoingup. The Free Press on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bfpnews

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