Festival Urine Turned Into Fertiliser to Grow 4,500 Trees
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📰 The quick summary: Urine collected from 700 festivalgoers at Boomtown festival has been turned into fertiliser that will help grow 4,500 native trees in Wales’s Brecon Beacons, turning a waste product into a circular solution for landscape restoration.
📈 One key stat: 540 litres of fertiliser were produced from urine collected at a single festival event, enough to support a three-year tree-planting project aiming to grow 4,500 native trees.
💬 One key quote: “We need to stop flushing crop and tree-growing nutrients down the loo and start using them to increase our fertiliser security,” said Lucy Bell-Reeves, co-founder of NPK Recovery.
1️⃣ The big picture: A startup has developed a way to turn human urine collected at festivals into liquid fertiliser, and the technology is now being used to restore native woodland in Wales. Urine gathered from 700 attendees at Boomtown festival in Hampshire was processed into 540 litres of fertiliser on-site using a mobile laboratory. That fertiliser will now support a three-year project to grow 4,500 native trees, including beech and Scots pine, on the edge of the Brecon Beacons national park. Backed by a Forestry Commission grant and carried out in partnership with the tree-planting charity Stump up for Trees, this marks the first time urine-derived fertiliser has been trialled on trees. Trials have shown the fertiliser performs as well as conventional alternatives, opening up a promising new avenue for sustainable land restoration.
2️⃣ Why is this good news: Turning a waste product that is normally flushed away into a resource for growing forests shows how circular thinking can benefit both nature and agriculture at the same time. Urine is rich in nitrogen and other nutrients that trees and crops need, meaning capturing it reduces dependence on synthetic fertilisers and strengthens what researchers call fertiliser security. At a landscape scale, projects like this can accelerate the restoration of native woodlands, which support biodiversity, regulate water and store carbon. The partnership with Stump up for Trees, a charity already halfway to planting one million trees in the Brecon Beacons, means this approach slots into an already proven conservation effort. If the trial succeeds, the model could be scaled to festivals and large public events across the country, turning everyday gatherings into engines of ecological restoration.
3️⃣ What’s next: Over the coming three years, the fertiliser will be applied to native tree seedlings on the edge of the Brecon Beacons to test how well they grow compared to conventional methods. Urine from sources beyond festivals will also feed into the project, broadening the supply of raw material. If results are positive, the approach could be rolled out at more events and expanded into wider forestry and agricultural applications.
Read the full story here: The Guardian – Festivalgoers’ urine to fertilise trees in Brecon Beacons restoration scheme
