You care about the
environment, you say. You compost your organic wastes and recycle the
rest. But what about your pee? Do you peecycle? No? What kind of a
treehugger are you?
Everybody pees. In fact, Americans produce about 30 billion gallons of urine every year. That, according to Kim Nace of
Rich Earth Institute,
represents a valuable resource that most of us just flush away.
Instead, Nace proposed that we recycle our urine and use it as
fertilizer as it is a "local, accessible, free, sanitary source of
nitrogen and phosphorus."
In other words, if you need a natural fertilizer, urine luck!
But how good is urine as fertilizer anyways? Last year, the Institute carried out an experiment to test it.
As reported by National Geographic,
that thanks to sixty enthusiastic community members, the Institute
collected 600 gallons of urine to fertilize a field of hay in a
Brattleboro, Vermont, farm. A 50/50 mix of urine and water was applied
to a test strip of land. The result was impressive:
Rich Earth Institute co-founder and Research Director Abe Noe-Hays said in an
interview in the Bennington Banner,
"the amount of nutrients in a year's worth of urine from one person is
almost all the fertilizer needed to grow food for that person in that
span."
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