Los Angeles Times

Need garden fertilizer? Urine luck

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ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A pair of University of Michigan researcher­s are putting the “pee” in peony.

Rather, they’re putting pee on peonies.

Environmen­tal engineerin­g professors Nancy Love and Krista Wigginton are regular visitors to the Ann Arbor school’s Nichols Arboretum, where they have been applying urine-based fertilizer to the heirloom peony beds ahead of the flowers’ annual spring bloom.

It’s all part of an effort to educate the public about their research showing that applying fertilizer derived from nutrient-rich urine could have environmen­tal and economic benefits.

“At first, we thought people might be hesitant. You know, this might be weird. But we’ve really experience­d very little of that attitude,” Wigginton said. “In general, people think it’s funny at first, but then they understand why we’re doing it, and they support it.”

Love is co-author of a study published in the Environmen­tal Science & Technology journal that found urine diversion and recycling led to significan­t reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and energy.

Urine contains essential nutrients such as nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus and has been used as a fertilizer for thousands of years.

Love said collecting human urine and using it to create renewable fertilizer­s — as part of what she calls the “circular economy of nutrients” — will lead to greater environmen­tal sustainabi­lity.

Think of it not so much as recycling, but “pee-cycling,” Wigginton said.

“We were looking for terms that would catch on but get the idea across, and ‘pee-cycling’ seems to be one that stuck,” she said.

As part of a $3-million grant from the National Science Foundation awarded in 2016, Love and Wigginton have not only been testing advanced urine-treatment methods, but also investigat­ing people’s attitudes about the use of urine-derived fertilizer­s.

That is what brought them to the much-loved campus Peony Garden, which contains more than 270 historic cultivated varieties from the 19th and early 20th centuries, representi­ng American, Canadian and European peonies of the era. The garden holds nearly 800 peonies when filled and up to 10,000 f lowers at peak bloom.

Love and Wigginton plan to spend weekends in May and June chatting up visitors. One important lesson they learned is about the precision of language.

“We have used the term ‘pee on the peonies.’ And then it grabs people’s attention, and then we can talk to them about nutrient flows and nutrient efficiency ... and how to be more sustainabl­e,” Love said. “It turns out some people thought that that was permission to drop their drawers and pee on the peonies.

“So, this year, we’re going to use ‘pee for the peonies’ and hope that we don’t have that confusion.”

The urine-derived fertilizer the researcher­s are using these days originated in Vermont. But if all goes according to plan, they’ll be doling out some locally sourced fertilizer next year.

A split-bowl toilet in a campus building is designed to send solid waste to a treatment plant while routing urine to a holding tank. Urine diverted from the toilet and urinal were to be treated and eventually used to create fertilizer­s, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced the school to shut down the collection efforts.

In the meantime, the facility is undergoing an upgrade to its freeze concentrat­or and adding a new pasteurize­r, both developed by the Vermont-based Rich Earth Institute.

“The whole idea is cycling within a community, so moving toward that we want to take urine from this community and apply it within this community,” Wigginton said.

 ?? Marcin Szczepansk­i Michigan Engineerin­g ?? KRISTA WIGGINTON applies human urinederiv­ed fertilizer to beds of peonies at an arboretum.
Marcin Szczepansk­i Michigan Engineerin­g KRISTA WIGGINTON applies human urinederiv­ed fertilizer to beds of peonies at an arboretum.

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