Pee-powered produce: How urine could rescue urban agriculture
The majority of nitrogen flushed down our toilets — especially in high-density urban areas — gets denitrified or diluted in centralized wastewater treatment plants, wasting both the nutrient and the energy used to remove it.
By Leah Elson
Ag Daily
April 23, 2025
Excerpt:
Urine comprises just 1 percent of wastewater by volume, but it carries up to 80 percent of its nitrogen, making it a high-impact target for recovery. The study, published in Resources, Conservation & Recycling, assessed three approaches to managing yellow water in a LEED-certified building in Catalonia, Spain, using life cycle assessment (LCA) modeling to weigh environmental tradeoffs.
The researchers compared:
S1: A constructed wetland that treats wastewater on-site via a plant-based biofilter.
S2: An aerobic bioreactor, a lab-scale system that nitrifies urine into liquid fertilizer.
S3: A centralized wastewater treatment plant as the standard “flush-and-forget” model.
Scenario S2 was the only system that recovered nitrogen for reuse — a win for circularity — but that advantage came with a cost: higher impacts in 6 of 8 LCA categories, especially on energy demand and ecotoxicity. Its net climate impact? Around 59 kg CO?-eq per cubic meter of treated urine, versus 40 kg CO?-eq for synthetic nitrogen … not quite a full environmental payback.
But here’s where things get interesting: scale the system up, and that payback period drops sharply — from 29 years at lab scale to 13 years when expanding recovery to all six urinals in the building. In other words, size (and user participation) matters.
Read the complete article here.
Source: https://cityfarmer.info/pee-powered-produce-how-urine-could-rescue-urban-agriculture/
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