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A new kind of bank
JUN 04 -
earing his volumes of wealth, Dr. Roshan Shrestha of UN-HABITAT arrives at the bank to make a donation. The cameras are ready, interests piqued, and a crowd gathers to watch Dr. Shrestha deposit his amber-tinted assets for the service of others. Not a fortune, but he could still have grown himself a nutritious tomato salad or a crunchy radish relish with the bottles of urine now being poured into the recently inaugurated human urine bank—a 1000 litre tank at Siddhipur and a 500 litre tank at Lubhu, both villages on the southern outskirts of Kathmandu.
Established with the support of a Swiss research institute, Eawag, and UN-HABITAT Nepal, the bank, similar to its namesake financial institution, will link those who have the capital—urine—with those who seek it. “This is the first time in South Asia that human urine is being collected on a communal scale,” asserts researcher Raju Khadka of Eawag. What started off as a joke, explains Dr. Shrestha, was now a reality.
Urika!
The benefits of urine are multi-fold. For Jiban Maharjan, president of the committee and a local farmer with extensive experience in urine application, the practice has increased his crop yield as well as its quality. Maharjan has grown legendary-sized radishes and other vegetables coveted for their flavour. These sell for more in the market. The use of urine also liberates farmers from the exigencies of soil degradation due to excess use of chemical fertilisers and injuries to health from the application of pesticides. “When I use urine, I don’t have to use pesticides like Metasin anymore, which has proven to cause cancer,” says Maharjan.
Supporting such practices are important “for our national self-reliance,” emphasises Niranjan Raj Bhandari, guest speaker at the inauguration ceremony of the human urine bank and team leader of Helvetas’s Sustainable Soil Management Programme. Nepal does not produce its own chemical fertilisers, and its imports are affected by heavy subsidies in India, logistical problems, and dubious quality due to a large informal sector that takes advantage of the open border. Urine allows farmers to cut dependency and costs on fertilisers, especially since many in Lubhu and Siddhipur do not own cows (whose dung is also used as a fertiliser).
According to a study conducted in the late 90’s in Sweden, an individual produces enough urine in one year to fertilise 180 kg of cereal or more than 50 percent of what he or she needs to eat. In Siddhipur, Eawag’s gross estimates show that a household of four could collect enough Nitrogen, Phosphate and Potassium—essential micronutrients for plant growth—to fertilise between half a ropani to one-and-a-half ropanis of land, depending on the type of crop and storage methods of urine.
Merry-go-round
Reusing urine draws a curve back into the nutrient cycle, which was unwound in recent decades by the invention of chemically-synthesised fertilisers and new sanitation practices. Farmers in Nepal are following the global trend of a surge in demand for chemical fertilisers and subsequent decline in more traditional methods of agriculture as witnessed during the green revolution. Modernisation has also brought new flush-and-forget forms of sanitation. Humans excrete almost all the nutrients they consume, the bulk of which is present in urine, but regrettably most of it ends up in water bodies or landfills. The need to recycle is especially urgent when one considers that phosphorous is a renewable resource afflicted by the irony of record rates of depletion. With the link broken between human excretions and tilled land, farmers are increasingly depending on chemical fertilisers, for which phosphorus must be extracted from phosphate rock mines. Global reserves of phosphate rock are expected to deplete within the next 50 to 130 years, even while 3 million tonnes of phosphorous is excreted as human waste every year. This leaves huge potential for phosphate “mining” in the human waste produced in urban and peri-urban centres.
Bankable
Even as handling urine initiates less cringe in Lubhu and Siddhipur, farmers have still not been able to take full advantage of the resource due to various logistical impediments—hence the urine bank. Some community-members face a quandary in ridding themselves of all the urine they produce, while others struggle to collect enough nutrient-rich urine to fertilise their soil—this new system should level these incongruities. Urine is voluminous, odorous and spillable. For those without or with far-removed cultivable land, it is especially difficult to make use of, except by pouring it on a compost heap, which is a comparatively-inefficient method of direct application due to nutrient losses. In Siddhipur, an Eawag study found that most urine collected from EcoSan, or urine-diverting, toilets was composted, only a fourth added directly to vegetables and crops, and some shared with neighbours. Especially in fallow times, many households were forced to simply drain their urine away.
The bank will function under strict regulation and oversight by a 23-member Human Urine Management Committee, whose mandate has been designed with long-term sustainability in mind. Every day, Narayan Sharma will visit four to five houses in the neighbourhood, riding a custom bike outfitted with two 20 litre jerricans, to amass an average of 1,000 litres of urine per week. He will transport urine from over 100 households that have in-built EcoSan toilets in Siddhipur or those that collect their pee in pots in nearby Lubhu. The urine will then be sold at a rate of Rs. 1 per litre on a rotational basis among the committee members in anticipation of high demand. Of the Rs. 1, fifty paisa will go to Narayan Sharma’s salary and fifty paisa will be collected in a bank account to support repairs of local sanitation equipment. The committee will log all their urine credits and debits.
Liquidity Crunch
Indeed, separating waste at the source is the best solution to our nutrient needs, but Siddhipur and Lubhu still have some brainstorming to do when it comes to the urine bank. “It is challenging enough to be a farmer, on top of that, to be a farmer that handles urine is even more challenging,” points out Matrika Dahal, alluding to the social stigmas surrounding urine. Will Siddhipur become the popular punch line for scatological humour? These constructed aversions are likely a practical response to another concern, namely hygiene. Researchers at Kathmandu University are studying the risk of pathogens and other possible harmful elements present in urine. Villagers must still be informed on proper cleansing methods after being in contact with raw urine. And what will happen when more people discover the value of their urine—will people want to offer up such golden winnings for free? Would security not be of concern—possible piss-creants leaking out a few litres from the bank? For only one ropani of land in just one sowing season, almost 1,000 litres of urine is needed. How will the collected amounts suffice for all the committee members?
Still, the model project is a pioneering attempt at sustainability. These two villages were able to establish a user committee solely for the management of urine, when no such separate institution or responsible organisation exists at the central policy level. Seeing waste in its distinctions, rather than a summary inconspicuous sludge, allows for more efficient management as well as the break-down of the barriers of repulsion. Hopefully similar projects are replicated by other villages and eventually scaled up. Already, talks are under way in Siddhipur to begin collection of urine at local schools and hospitals. With Kathmandu and its over 1 billion litres of urine per year just nearby—why let such riches go to waste?
smriti.mallapaty@gmail.com
Posted on: 2010-06-05 08:54
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