Courtesy AdkAction (2021)
Compost for Good is John Culpepper, left, Katie Culpepper, and Jennifer Perry. The team is a part of the nonprofit AdkAction.
This much the Compost for Good team has figured out: Human urine, with some saw dust, water and time, can become healthy, clean, arable soil. Whether a plucky entrepreneur can turn it into a bag of potting soil for sale at a garden center is yet another question.
As part of AdkAction, Compost for Good, has won a $6,000 grant from the Cloudsplitter Foundation to plan a demonstration and research facility that will help answer that next question.
(Cloudsplitter Foundation is named after a peak in the Adirondack Park and is a nonprofit organization that has environmental sustainability as a core mission.)
The idea behind the facility would be to show how the process works and how much compost can be created on a larger scale, John Culpepper, the leader of the Compost for Good team, said in an interview yesterday.
“We've taken about two tons of human urine and turned it into a viable compost," Culpepper said. That experiment yielded a dark, rich soil. Although the team has not applied for an official designation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Culpepper said the qualities of the soil should allow the EPA to classify it as “biosolids compost,” the Class A designation that allows the soil for use in all situations.
"It resembles in every way a good compost that sells for a lot of money in local garden centers,” he said. "This has great commercial viability."
Plus, the time is now to look at waste and how it might be reused and brought back to the rocky soil of the mountains, Brittany Christenson, the executive director of AdkAction said. Her group looks at both environmental sustainability inside the Adirondack Park and at creating stable, vibrant communities, especially around issues of food and economic security.
From the research and development end, they are looking to find other businesses that may profit. Both Christenson and Culpepper agreed that the project fits with that mission. AdkAction is not in the the business of creating the soil themselves.
This project "creates more vibrancy in the community," Christenson said. "Everybody wins."
To that end, the grant from the Cloudsplitter Foundation will allow the company to find a suitable location for a testing site, determine the size and capacity of the site, reach out to potential investors and entrepreneurs and allow other planning work.
It will not actually build the site. Culpepper hopes to find that money in another grant.
But why this project now?
"Human urine is a really valuable resource” that we flush down the toilet, Culpepper said. Once there, it enters a wastewater treatment facility or goes into septic systems.
Urine contains nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, which if properly processed become a healthy component of plant growth. If they enter a waterway unprocessed, they can create unhealthy algal blooms and other problems, he said.
Urine also contains much of the excreted by-products of the pharmaceutical drugs people take. If the urine enters the water way, it brings those drugs with them. The heat created in composting breaks down the larger pharmaceutical compounds into smaller, unharmful pieces, Culpepper said.
Moreover, the "sawdust" in the original experiment was actually the wood pellets used in home heating, which are high-quality pellets. The process does not need that quality of wood and could use other byproducts of logging including the waste wood produced when forests are cleared.
Finally, Culpepper said, the soil produced has a specific fungus that is great at absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and sequestering it for decades, which helps to fight global warming.
On Aug. 31, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik’s office announced another grant to Compost for Good: “$90,825 to provide technical assistance and educational resources for organic material recycling.” This award will create at least 16 jobs, the release said. Culpepper said it was not part of the human urine planning project.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated to reflect the correct amount of the grant, $6,000. We regret the error.