Urine drying – Kretsloppsteknik

Startup-meeting of the new Horizone Europe project P2Green

Published 14 January, 2023
By Björn Vinnerås

Björn Vinnerås, Jenna Senecal and Jennifer McConville attended the startup-meeting in Hannover during the second week of January. Included in the project from SLU is also Prithvi Simha and two PhD students under employment. Our main work is within the “Swedish pilot region”, where we will focus on the upscaling of the urine dehydration process. Our focus is the first two work packages WP1 – Blue printing the regional clusters and WP2 – Monitoring and assessing the benefits. Jenna was presenting the Swedish pilot region with the full cycle of urine collection to food production. See more at the project home page https://p2green.eu/

Jenna Presenting the Swedish pilot region with the full cycle of fertiliser production from urine to the field and final food production.

Almedalen 2022 Presentations by Jenna Senecal

Published 15 July, 2022
By Abood Aliahmad

On July 3rd Jenna Senecal presented at Almedalen 2022. The first presentation was about our urine treatment technology (link to the video presentation found here https://youtu.be/h0L8WeJIACw). The second was a panel discussion about youth and sustainable food systems hosted by SIANI, World Food Program, and Agroforestry Network (link to the video presentation found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_ue8_ttYws).

Barley plant trial on Gotland is growing well

Published 15 July, 2022
By Abood Aliahmad

On Gotland, we have a 350 m2 field trial growing barley that has been fertilized with dried urine (collected on Gotland in summer 2021 with TouchDown), mineral fertilizer or no fertilizer. This summer, we complemented the urine fertilizer with mineral phosphorus to match the recommended fertilizer needs of malting barley. The fertilized plants are growing well, while the none fertilized plants are shorter. We will harvest in late August and test the grain quality.

Jenna Senecal inspecting the barley plants, July 2nd ;

Barley plants (day 54) fertilized with urine (left), mineral fertilizer (right) or no fertilizer (middle) ;

Two new interns for the urine drying project

Published 19 December, 2018
By Prithvi Simha

The latest additions to Kretsloppsteknik are two interns, Chinmoy Deb and Anooj Ramanathan, coming all the way from India to work on urine drying for their bachelor’s thesis. During their bachelors program, both Chinmoy and Anooj have been doing research on sanitation, working with nutrient recovery as well as removal of pharmaceutical residues from human urine. A keen interest in sanitation and hygiene technologies brings them to our group at SLU for a 3-months long internship that began in December. Over the course of the internship, they will be involved in ongoing projects related to process modelling, intensification, and optimization.

Finnish delegation visits SLU to discuss on-site urine treatment

Published 27 September, 2018
By Prithvi Simha

Last week our group hosted a delegation of stakeholders from Finland, representing between them the City of Tampere, The Finnish Environment Institute, The Global Dry Toilet Association of Finland and Tampere University of Applied Sciences. They were at SLU to discuss their ongoing projects, MORTTI – mobile nutrient recovery under field conditions and HIERAKKA – long-term effects of applying urine fertilizers. The project looks at identifying and piloting new solutions for the capture and utilisation of nutrients in urine and faeces. We thus discsussed the possibilities for on-site treatment of urine in Finland as well as potential collaboration for implementing urine drying technology at pilot study locations. This was followed by visits to our lab, where we have been running three household-scale urine drying systems & a tour of our black soldier fly composting colony. PC: Carl Willandt, Ekokumppanit Oy

The 6th Dry Toilet Conference, Finland

Published 28 August, 2018
By Prithvi Simha

Prithvi Simha, PhD student at kretsloppsteknik, participated in the 6th International Dry Toilet Conference that was held in Tampere, Finland, between 22-24 August. Prithvi presented our ongoing research on alkaline urine dehydration technology and shared experiences of installing & operating a household-scale urine dehydration unit for three months at the SLU campus.

Full-scale urine drying trials at SLU

Published 23 May, 2018
By Prithvi Simha

This week, the Environmental Engineering group at SLU starts its full-scale urine drying experiments. The group has designed and built 6 household-scale urine drying prototypes for the experiments. Over the coming months, every day, these units will be drying 24 litres of urine. The biggest challenge so far has been to collect enough daily fresh urine to feed the prototypes. We thank all those who have donated urine so far, and hope that these donating keep coming. Your donations can potentially help revolutionise sanitation!

Urine donation points at toilets across the Department of Energy & Technology, SLU; PhD Candidate Prithvi Simha eager to get the experiments started in our Hygiene Lab

Implementing Urine Drying technology in Durban, South Africa

Published 11 April, 2018
By Prithvi Simha

Prithvi Simha, Jenna Senecal, and Björn Vinnerås just returned after spending a week in Durban, South Africa. We travelled there to present our novel sanitation technology called alkaline urine dehydration to several potential collaborators, and to see if the technology could fit into the local context. We met with sanitation experts from the Pollution Research Group at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the eThekwini Municipality, and Envirosan (a toilet manufacturer based in Durban). The trip was extremely fruitful with a positive response from all experts about our technology. We even brought back with us two new urine-diverting toilets to test our system with (thank you Envirosan!). Our next step will be to return to Durban with a pilot-scale urine drying system that the Pollution Research Group will test at their research facility. Following this, drying units will also be tested in people’s homes at the eThekwini municipality. A big thank you to Chris Buckley for co-ordinating the trip & to the NJ Committee on Global Affairs for the financial assistance.SLU EnviroSan Loot; PC: Chris Buckley

The Future in Sanitation is off the grid!

Published 31 October, 2017
By Prithvi Simha

How much water do each of us use every day? Can future sanitation systems and off-the-grid houses be designed so as to minimize energy and water consumption? Where does wastewater management fit into the waste hierarchy/pyramid? In his presentation, Björn Vinnerås, Associate Professor at SLU shares with us his vision of future housing: a future where there is ‘no need for network connections, neither electricity nor water, and nor wastewater’.

Click here to access the presentation.