Author: Prithvi Simha

On 7th February, we inaugurated our new urine-diverting toilet here at the department of energy and technology, at SLU’s Ultuna campus. The installation was made possible due to a grant from SLU-climate fund that financed the installation together with the Save! Urine diverting flushed toilet from Laufen and SLU’s landlord Akademiska hus. The existing conventional toilet was exchanged with the new Laufen toilet “Save!” as a permanent installation. The urine is led out from the wall and connected to the test bed (the larger box on the side into where the urine drying equipment is installed).

Towards the end of January, Jenna Senecal and Viktoria Wiklicky from Kretsloppsteknik were in Tampere, Finland to decomission our 25 L/day urine drying system that was in operation at the basement of Lielahti Manor house. The system was in use in between June 2019 and January 2020, and was a great showcase of the group’s and Sanitation360 AB’s on-site urine treatment technology, alkaline urine dehydration. Through this project, we demonstrated to our various Finnish partners that our technology is scalable, socio-technically feasbile, and marks a significant step away from erstwhile urine processing technologies. We are very thankful to our various collaborators, partners and stakeholders that helped make this a successful pilot project – Tampere City, Tampere University of Applied Sciences, Hiedanranta Development Programme, city workers, officials, plumbers, subcontractors, research interns, and others.

My name is Natnael Girma, I’m a Ph.D. student from Ethiopia. I’m currently working on a research project on safe nutrient recovery from source separated urine for sustainable fertilizer production. I recently joined the energy and technology department (kretsloppsteknik unit) at SLU, as a licentiate student to do my research project. The project focuses on assessing adsorptive characteristics of pharmaceuticals during the production of urine-based fertilizers and the fate of pharmaceuticals during their end-use in agriculture. The second part of the research focuses on the microbial safety of using dry urine-based fertilizers in perspective of abundance of horizontally transmissible antibiotic resistant gene element.  

In October 2019, Jenna Senecal travelled to Arles, France, to connect with Nick Davies from peeKeep. Nick has designed a new toilet and cabin and wanted to test how our alkaline dehydration technology could be integrated. The toilet uses a conveyer belt to transport the excreta and toilet paper to a drying chamber outside (the black PVC unit). While the urine is drained and collected for alkaline treatment (the black and grey sheet metal box). Nick will be building more of these toilets to be installed in various locations in southern France. The aim is to have all systems (light inside the cabin, toilet, excreta treatment) running off of solar voltaics.