The Massachusetts Alternative Septic System Technology Center (MASSTC) has received more than $416,000 from the state to test out urine diverting toilets in Falmouth.
Urine diversion is a wastewater management method that could help address Cape Cod's nutrient pollution problem.
CAI's Gilda Geist spoke with MASSTC project assistant Bryan Horsley to learn more about this pilot project, which has been years in the making.
Gilda Geist The state has awarded MASSTC more than $400,000 for a project that will hopefully provide some insight into how we on Cape Cod and beyond can better manage our wastewater. What is that project all about?
Bryan Horsley Yeah, so we were recently awarded $416,997 basically to install 25 urine diverting toilet systems in impaired watersheds in the town of Falmouth. The reason that we are interested in doing this project is to help address the nitrogen pollution and phosphorus pollution that we're experiencing, and the reason that urine diversion makes a lot of sense is because when you're looking at the contents of residential wastewater, about 80 percent of the nitrogen and about 50 percent of the phosphorus that's entering the wastewater stream enters in the form of urine.
GG What does a urine-diverting toilet actually look like?
BH The toilet is an alternative type of toilet bowl. It could also be a wall-mounted urinal. It separates the urine from feces or anything else that's going down the toilet and puts it into a sealed holding tank in the basement of the home typically, or it could be an outdoor underground tank.
GG What is the grant money going to be used for within this project?
BH The whole project is roughly $417,000, and the bulk of what that money will go towards is subsidizing the installation of the toilet systems. We're offering $7,500 per household. Beyond the subsidies for installations, basically it's going to cover our staff time and managing the project, as well as the sampling and analysis of those samples at our partner laboratories. Really the overarching goal of all of this work is to try to get some baseline information about how well these urine diverting systems can work to remove nitrogen and phosphorus. This project is specific to Falmouth, but the implications are really Cape-wide, county-wide.
GG You folks at MASSTC have been trying to get this project going for a while now. What barriers did you all face and how did you overcome them to get to this point?
BH This whole project really initiated when some representatives from the town of Falmouth came over here to the test center. This is over two years ago now. And they said there's significant interest among residents in the town of Falmouth in this idea of urine diversion. And so they asked if we would be willing to manage a project to sort of assess urine diversion. We said, yeah, sure. So, the town of Falmouth contracted with us through an inter-municipal agreement that we've been working on now for over a year. That work that we've been contracted by the town to do has been to look at all those barriers. The big one is the regulatory challenges. To this day, urine diversion is still not completely legal for managing wastewater, so we've been working very closely with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection to get appropriate permits. We've also had to work with the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources because the big picture for urine diversion is to actually recycle the urine and to treat it as necessary to make it into fertilizer products.
GG Anything else you think people should know about this project?
BH In my position here at MASSTC, a lot of people rely on us for answers to what I would say is our biggest regional environmental problem—that's nutrient pollution. We've seen large algal blooms, like notably in Waquoit Bay. And also, I'm getting regular notices in my email inbox about cyanobacteria blooms in freshwater ponds. People are very concerned about the seemingly slow process to implement solutions. We know that sewers are an effective way to move polluted wastewater from homes and bring it to a central plant where it can be treated. They're also very expensive and they take a long time to implement. And [there are] similar issues with innovative alternative septic systems. They do perform well. They remove the majority of the nitrogen from residential wastewater. They are expensive. It also takes time to implement that strategy as well. So, a lot of people see urine diversion as something that can be done quickly. A urine diversion system is relatively inexpensive compared to the other options. And so, I really see urine diversion, hopefully, as another tool that we can use to address nutrient pollution.
