‘This is not a hippy thing’: the startup recycling urine to make natural fertiliser

"The chokehold on the strait of Hormuz, through which about a third of the global trade in raw materials for fertilisers – and a fifth of shipments of the liquified fossil gas required to make them – passes, has acutely exposed the vulnerability of the fertiliser market and spurred renewed interest in alternatives...

“If we were to recycle all the urine of people in Europe, I think we could cover around 30% of the nitrogen need,” said de Chambrier."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/04/startup-recycling-urine-natural-fertiliser-vunanexus

It does seem very illogical that we expend enormous amounts of energy to capture nitrogen from the air, dump it on fields where a good proportion runs straight off into the rivers and pollutes them, then eat the crops and piss it back out and, at least in the UK, dump that back into the rivers too.

#NitrogenCycle #HaberProccess #SustainableAgriculture #Eutrophication #SewagePollution