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Environmental engineering professors Nancy Love and Krista Wigginton have been applying urine-based fertilizer to the heirloom peony beds ahead of the flowers' annual spring bloom.
According to Huffington Post it is all pat of an effort to educate the public about their research showing that applying fertilizer derived from nutrient-ric urine could have environmental and economic benefits.
"At first, we thought people might be hesitant. You know, this might be weird. But we've really experienced very little of that attitude. In general, people think it's funny at first, but then they understand why we're doing it and they support it." said Wigginton
It was found that urine diversion and recycling led to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and energy. Urine contains essential nutrients such as nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus and has been used as a crop fertilizer for thousands of years. Love said that collecting human urine and using it to create renewable fertilizers, as part of what she calls the "circular economy of nutrients" will lead to greater environmental sustainability.
As part of a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation awarded in 2016, Love and Wigginton have not only been testing advanced urine-treatment methods, but also investigating people’s attitudes about the use of urine-derived fertilizers.
That is what brought them to the much-loved campus Peony Garden, which contains more than 270 historic cultivated varieties from the 19th and early 20th centuries representing American, Canadian and European peonies of the era. The garden holds nearly 800 peonies when filled and up to 10,000 flowers at peak bloom.
A split-bowl toilet in a campus engineering building is designed to send solid waste to a treatment plant while routing urine to a holding tank downstairs. Urine diverted from the toilet and urinal were to be treated and eventually used to create fertilizers, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced the school to shut down the collection efforts.
In the meantime, the facility is undergoing an upgrade to its freeze concentrator and adding a new, more energy-efficient pasteurizer, both developed by the Vermont-based Rich Earth Institute.
“The whole idea is cycling within a community, so moving toward that we want to take urine from this community and apply it within this community,” Wigginton said