NPK Recovery poised to advance fertiliser aims with Bristol Pride event
NPK Recovery, a start-up from UWE Bristol, will be collecting pee at this year's Bristol Pride in a bid to turn it into a sustainable fertiliser.
The aim is to transform the waste product into something to address some of the problems facing the agricultural sector, including rising costs and low yields from synthetic fertilisers and to use this as a potential model at other large-scale events.
The company will collect around 2,000 litres of urine from Bristol Pride, a music festival, which celebrates the LGBT+ community, before using it for testing and development. Turning it into fertiliser involves introducing bacteria that unlocks nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and other nutrients within it so it can be absorbed by crops.
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"The price of fertiliser has shot up in the last couple of years and the UK’s last remaining fertiliser factory closed in 2022," said Hannah Van Den Bergh, founder of NPK Recovery, which is based at UWE Bristol's enterprise and innovation centre Future Space.
"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," added Van Den Bergh.
George Barnsley, 22, who is on an internship with NPK Recovery, will be involved in testing the resulting fertiliser product from the collection on seeds grown within UWE Bristol greenhouse, Envirotron.
"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," he said.
"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."
Bristol Pride festival director Eve Russell added: "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 - its 15th year of support for the event.
