Recycling is breaking the final taboos. You’ve heard of farm-to-table, but how about flush-to-bottle? In Oregon, a new kind of beer is brewing – made from treated water that was once in the toilet.
“All water is recycled, and drinking reclaimed water is nothing new,” said Bill Gaffi, general manager of Clean Water Services in Hillsboro, Oregon.
The water treatment takes from the Forest Grove Treatment Plant that has been treated with a variety of technologies, including reverse osmosis, ultrafiltration, and advanced oxidation process (which uses ultraviolet light to clean the water). Gaffi points out that the water exceeds federal drinking water standards, and it’s so pure that most brewers have to add back in salts to mimic water from Belgium or Germany.
Nothing starts a conversation like a beer – and that’s why Clean Water Services started the brewing contest. Last fall, a group of local Oregon home-brewers held a contest to use the water in beer, and Ted Assur won by making a Wit style beer fermented with Ardennes yeast – and 30% purified wastewater (this year, the contest will use 100% purified wastewater).
“I learned that we have a sort of ‘amnesia’ about water and think our water is pure when we get it, when in fact most of us live downstream from effluent discharge,” says Assur. “The history of the water is completely irrelevant – what matters is the quality.”
From beer to bodies
The trend of recycling ourselves isn’t limited to water. Katrina Spade, an architect and designer, had a moment in architecture school where she started to wonder how much space human bodies take up after death. Spade became fascinated by the wasteful, toxic processes in typical burials: each year, more than 30m board-feet of hardwood and 90,000 tons of steel are buried in coffins, and more than 750,000 gallons of formaldehyde-laden embalming fluid is buried in the US Cremation avoids many of those issues, but it has other problems: burning a human body emits about 540lbs of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
“I thought: geez, death is one of the most important events we have as humans, and yet we don’t treat our bodies with a lot of reverence,” says Spade.
Spade discovered that farmers had been developing ways to quickly and safely compost dead livestock for years. Cemeteries, she learned, didn’t become popular in the US until the 1800s – so perhaps it wasn’t a practice set in stone.
In April 2014, she founded the Urban Death Project, a nonprofit that aims to find a better, greener way to return to the dust. While natural, simple burials are possible in the countryside – where land is available – the Urban Death Project targets the areas that don’t have room for more cemeteries.
The project, which is still in the research phase, uses special chamber with mechanical aeration, woodchips and microbes that break down the body quickly. After around six weeks, Spade says, family members could return to take some of the composted material, if they wish, and pay their respects.
“That’s a nice amount of time to come back, and have that first sense of grieving. I think that timeframe becomes part of the ritual,” Spade says.
The project is just starting to partner with some research institutions to test the compost procedure cadavers. Eventually, she’d like to see a safe, green system for decomposing bodies in every town. As the project scaled, each town or municipality could have the devices for breaking down bodies – but it would be housed in a space that was unique and meaningful to the surrounding area. Spade adds that some people have already left their bodies to the project in their wills.
Fertilizer from your toilet
For those who aren’t quite ready to compost their whole bodies, urea donations are another way to give back to the land.
As it turns out, we flush away some of the best fertilizer on the planet. Pee contains three-quarters of the plant nutrients that come out of our bodies, and none of the pathogens present in poop – all concentrated in about 1% of the sewage flow. Not to mention that four out of five flushes per day are for pee: that’s 4,000 gallons of clean water per person each year just to wash urine down the toilet.
Composting toilets are a technology that’s been around since the 1850s and sometimes include a urine diversion channel, which shunts pee off to be held in a separate chamber from solid waste. Waste is then broken down by microbes.
Abraham Noe-Hays, co-founder of the Rich Earth Institute, a Brattleboro Vermont-based nonprofit, says that his project is looking to collect 6,000 gallons of urine this year. They partner with people who install urine-diverting toilet systems in their homes, and they collect giant containers of pee for their trials.
After collecting the urine, the project team pasteurizes it using a small solar heater or store it for a few months to knock out any potential pathogens. Then they test its nutrient levels and apply it to hay fields. The project is also working on ways to make the urine into a stable, odorless, transportable form so future urinals could collect pee to be trucked long distances to farms.
Just how much liquid money is in your bladder? A person pees out about a quart and a half of urine, containing 11 grams of nitrogen and 1 gram of phosphorus each day. While those aren’t huge numbers, multiply that by the population of the US and it’s enough to grow a sizeable amount of wheat.
“Every day you’re pissing away a loaf of bread,” says Noe-Hays. “The US could meet a quarter of its fertilizer needs just by reclaiming all the urine produced in a year.”
One of the biggest obstacles to scaling the technology is concern from the public about residual pharmaceuticals in our urine. The Institute is doing a research project looking into whether leftover drugs end up in food grown with pee-fertilizer. Preliminary tests show no evidence that they do, says Noe-Hays.
The real savings comes not from the potential fertilizers, but from keeping the nutrients out of the waste stream in the first place. Cities spend millions – in some cases between $530 to $5,790 per person per year – to remove phosphorus and nitrogen from water so those nutrients don’t create dangerous blooms downstream. For homeowners with septic systems, it can cost up to $500 per pound just to remove nitrogen from a tank.
Noe-Hays says that the incentive to peecycle isn’t as much of a hard sell as you might think. “It really taps something that a lot of other things we do environmentally don’t tap into – that creative aspect,” he says. “Urine is something we’re conditioned to hide and get rid of, but instead it’s creating something of value.”