Rural Vermont Community Donates Its Urine to Farmers for Their Crops: Pee Is 'An Untapped Resource'

Members of a rural community in Vermont are collecting and donating their urine to farmers across the state who then use it to sustainably fertilize their crops.

Betsy Williams is one of 250 residents in Windham County who donate approximately 12,000 gallons of urine to the Urine Nutrient Reclamation Program (UNRP), which is run by the Vermont-based nonprofit Rich Earth Institute (REI), the BBC reported.

"We're consuming all of these things that have nutrients in them, and then a lot of the nutrients that are passing through us can then get recycled back into helping create food for us and for animals. So to me, it's logical," Williams told the BBC, adding that "everybody pees. [It's an] untapped resource."

The donations are collected by a truck that has a tank that sterilizes and then stores the urine, which is then sprayed on farmland when it is time to fertilize the crops.

Not only does "peecycling" require about half the amount of water needed to grow farmland, but it also reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Since 2012, UNRP estimated it has conserved more than 2.7 million gallons of water through its program.

"I've always been a systems thinker, and our [water] system has inefficiencies in it," Nancy Love, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan and longtime collaborator with REI, told the BBC.

"What we do today is dilute the hell out of our urine, we put it in a pipe, we send it to a treatment plant, and then we pump a bunch more energy into it, just to send it back into the environment in a reactive form," she added.