Toilets Offer Eco-Friendly Fertilizer Alternatives
Source: https://www.miragenews.com/toilets-offer-eco-friendly-fertilizer-929339/
To tackle the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and pollution, humanity will need to move to a circular economy, where all resources are recycled. Why not recycle our own body waste too as fertilizer, provided there is no risk that harmful microbes or traces from pharmaceuticals end up in the consumed crops? Most nutrients needed for plant growth occur in human urine and feces. Urine is especially rich in nitrogen and potassium, and also contains trace amounts of metals such as boron, zinc, and iron. Feces could in theory supply other nutrients such as phosphorus, calcium, and magnesium or valuable organic carbon to soils. “If correctly prepared and quality-controlled, up to 25% of conventional synthetic mineral fertilizers in Germany could be replaced by recycling fertilizers from human urine and feces. Combined with an agricultural transition involving the reduction of livestock farming and plant cultivation for fodder, even less synthetic fertilizer would be necessary, resulting for example in lower consumption of fossil natural gas.” They also tested two so-called ‘nitrified urine fertilizers’ (NUFs), modern products synthetized from human urine that has been collected separately from feces, in which nitrogen-bearing compounds are conved by microbes into valuable ammonium and nitrate. The first NUF was Aurin, recently approved for use in human agriculture in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Austria. The second was CROP (combined regenerative organic food production), developed by the Institute of Aerospace Medicine of the German Aerospace Center to recycle wastewater on Moon or Mars bases