Can we be making better use of our abundant, nutrient-rich urine?
That'll be the topic of the Rich Earth Summit, a three-day conference in Marlboro, Vermont happening in November. On the agenda are a few speakers from right here on Cape Cod.
CAI’s Gilda Geist spoke to Julia Cavicchi, education director for the Rich Earth Institute, to get a better idea of what insights this summit might offer into how we can best use our pee.
Gilda Geist What is this year's Rich Earth Summit all about?
Julia Cavicchi So the Rich Earth Summit is a global gathering for folks researching and implementing urine nutrient recycling from all around the world, and it's been going on since 2015. This year is going to be our 10th annual get together, and this year, like last year, it’s going to be a hybrid event. So we'll have an in-person summit hub in over a month where people will come together to share their work. And then it's also going to be accessible via Zoom, so you can join virtually as well.
It's a three-day event featuring research projects from agriculture to treatment technologies to design principles, all about strategies for reclaiming our human urine as a resource to protect our watersheds from nutrient pollution and to procure those nutrients for use and sustainable agriculture.
GG It looks like this summit will have speakers from all over the world: France, Nigeria, Bolivia and Cape Cod. Who from our area will be speaking at the summit and what will they be talking about?
JC We're going to be featuring two Cape Cod presentations in our implementation projects panel, which is going to be on Wednesday, November 13th, in the morning. Hilda [Maingay] and Earle [Barnhart] from the Green Center will share insights from their urine diversion pilot study that happened in the fall of 2023. And then we'll have Bryan Horsley from the Massachusetts Alternative Septic System Test Center, or MASSTC, and he'll be sharing updates about their work developing a pilot project with the town of Falmouth, and also working with Massachusetts regulators and other residents to incorporate urine nutrient recycling as a strategy in the watershed management plan.
GG On Cape Cod, we have a lot of environmental issues caused by nutrient pollution, largely from backyard septic systems. So what kinds of solutions, and especially scalable solutions, do you think the Rich Earth Summit can offer when it comes to these environmental issues on Cape Cod?
JC So urine contains a vast majority of nutrients in our wastewater which contribute to these nutrient pollution problems in our watersheds. So if we can divert urine at the source and reclaim it, and also even replace synthetic fertilizers that may be also imported into the watershed, then we can help to mitigate those nutrient pollution problems.
There are some really impressive projects that have been happening around the world on bringing urine recycling to scale. Last year we had a presentation from Paris about an entire neighborhood complex that's being developed that's going to incorporate urine diversion funded by the Paris Water Agency. The water agency there recognizes that urine is such a great source of nutrient pollution in their river, the river Seine, that they now subsidize up to 80 percent of new development projects that incorporate urine diversion, and that enables these larger systems to start to come to scale.
So I think there's a lot of strategies that folks can learn, and have cross-pollinating from each other around the world, about how this can happen at a community scale and how we can share strategies both on the community engagement and education side of things, and then also on the technical pieces of how to streamline the collection, treatment and processing of urine into a fertilizer.
GG Is there anything else you think our listeners might want to know about the upcoming Rich Earth Summit?
JC Well, the keynote speaker at our summit this year is going to be Sarah Nahar, who's going to be presenting the keynote: To Have Excretory Justice, We Have to Deal With Our Crap. And that's really going to be a cross-cutting theme of the summit—exploring the intersection of sanitation, justice, and nutrient recycling.
A lot of folks come into the urine recycling field from the core driver of mitigating nutrient pollution problems in our watershed. But there's also a very kind of aligned field of folks looking at similar sanitation solutions, but for the primary goal of providing sanitation access to folks who don't already have it. And that's a problem around the world, but also around 2.2 million people in the United States lack access to adequate sanitation.
We don't have solutions to that whole national problem at our summit, but we're going to be kind of uplifting conversations that explore the intersection of reclaiming our waste as a resource and also creating sanitation solutions with people who need them.
The Rich Earth Summit will be from November 12 to 14. Registration for in-person attendance ends this Friday, October 25. Registration for virtual attendance ends November 12.
