Turning Porta-Potties Into Fertilizer Factories: Inside The Circular Sanitation Revolution
About this episode
The episode discusses the innovative approach of turning human waste into fertilizer through the work of wasted* PBC.
Every day, billions of gallons of liquid fertilizer get flushed down the drain with clean drinking water. The nutrients your body produces — nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium — are the exact same ones farmers pay a fortune to spray on their crops. And the portable sanitation industry? It hasn't meaningfully innovated since the 1970s. The founders of wasted* saw all of this and thought: what if we stopped wasting our waste? Thor is a co-founder of wasted* PBC, a Vermont-based benefit corporation that's flipping the porta-potty business on its head. What started as a backpacking trip where he literally couldn't avoid stepping in human waste on remote mountain trails became a nonprofit, then a three-month road trip disassembling toilets across the West Coast, then a quarantine-era revelation that human urine is nature's perfect fertilizer — and finally, a venture-backed company that's registered the first urine-derived fertilizer in five U.S. states.
Topics covered
- circular economy
- sanitation
- fertilizer
- innovation
- sustainability
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