Bristol start-up collects urine from Bristol Pride to develop sustainable fertiliser

A start-up based at UWE Bristol is collecting thousands of litres of urine from this year’s Bristol Pride to support the development of a sustainable nutrient-rich plant fertiliser.

NPK Recovery, which is based at UWE Bristol’s enterprise and innovation centre Future Space, plans to turn the waste product into a safe and highly sustainable fertiliser that will help to address some of the problems facing the agricultural sector, including rising costs and low yields from synthetic fertilisers.

NPK Recovery will collect approximately 2000 litres of urine from Bristol Pride, a music festival at The Downs in Bristol which celebrates the LGBT+ community. The company will collect the urine through the innovative urinals of PEEQUAL, designed for women and people who squat to use the toilet.

The start-up will use the urine to support the ongoing testing and development stage of the business. The process of turning urine into fertiliser involves introducing bacteria to the urine that unlocks nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and other nutrients within it so it can be absorbed by crops.

Hannah Van Den Bergh, founder of NPK Recovery, said: “The price of fertiliser has shot up in the last couple of years and the UK’s last remaining fertiliser factory closed in 2022. Huge amounts of the fertiliser used in the UK is imported, which is not only environmentally unsustainable due to production and transport emissions, reliance on imports can be a precarious situation for farmers - if supply chains are impacted, as we saw with the war in Ukraine, there is a risk that the volumes of fertiliser needed won’t be available.

“Aside from that, we also have a real issue in the UK with our sewage waste. By collecting the urine before it enters our sewage system there is the potential to reduce the impact on wastewater treatment plants, where a huge amount of time and money is spent removing nutrients from waste - nutrients that could instead be captured and put to use in a more sustainable fertiliser that still delivers the crop yields farmers need. France, Switzerland and the US have commercially available fertiliser made from urine, so there is real opportunity to do the same in the UK.”

A final year UWE Bristol Environmental Science student, George Barnsley, 22, is currently taking part in an internship with NPK Recovery. George will be heavily involved in testing the resulting fertiliser product from the collection at Bristol Pride on seeds grown within UWE Bristol’s large greenhouse, Envirotron, which is used for research across biodiversity, environmental change, conservation and food security.

George said: “Taking part in this internship with NPK Recovery has been a brilliant opportunity to put some of the skills that I gained from my Environmental Science degree at UWE Bristol into practice, from analytical skills to soil sampling. It has been amazing to be taught new skills by the incredible team - learning the fundamentals of writing grants, thinking creatively to tackle challenges, and working within an innovative environment has given me some really valuable experience.”

Following the results of the testing phase, NPK Recovery hopes to use this as a model for collecting urine from other large-scale events where huge quantities of the waste product are readily available before it reaches the sewage system.

Bristol Pride festival director, Eve Russell said: “Sustainability is really important to us at Bristol Pride, and we’re really pleased to be able to support NPK Recovery in its development phase and into the future.”

UWE Bristol is Sustainability sponsor at this year’s Bristol Pride, it’s fifteenth year of support for the event.