Glastonbury, the massive UK festival held nearly every year since 1970, will provide gallons of urine to a start-up that has found an interesting use for it.
NPK Recovery is implementing its tech to recycle festivalgoer pee into environmentally friendly fertilizer. This is being done by partnering with Glastonbury’s female toilet provider, Peequal. After everything is collected post-festival, NPK’s labs will receive it for processing.
This isn’t the first time urine has been used in such a way at the festival. With so many people, in 2019, they were able to power the screens on the Pyramid Stage with a special urinal. We also previously reported on NASA recycling astronaut pee for drinking water.
NPK Recovery spoke with The Times about the £72,000 ($91,027.44) grant that Peequal acquired to allow the project to go ahead.
Glastonbury, despite its sanitary surface, is still a festival in the United Kingdom. That means who-knows-what is being ingested and filtered out of the body.
The Register pointed to a 2021 BBC report, that claimed the water nearby the festival was contaminated with MDMA. BBC’s report states that a test on the river found quadruple the amount of MDMA a week after the festival.
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Acknowledging the task at hand, NPK’s founder, Hannah Van Den Bergh, said this was almost a “worst-case scenario” for the process:
“We’re almost using Glastonbury as a kind of ‘worst case scenario’ urine. If we can clean that, then we can basically accept anything to go through our system.”
NPK has also noted that selling urine fertilizer is still hard to compete with other, cheaper options. However, it’s hoping this will be a step forward in the urine-to-farm fertilizer market.
Glastonbury is set to happen this weekend, with thousands set to attend. While there are no broadcasts in the US according to Newsweek, if you hop through some hoops you can watch it via BBC iPlayer.
