2021 Summit Recordings
Watch recordings of the presentations and check out the discussion saved from the chat in accompanying PDFs below.
KEYNOTE
Making Change: Taking the Water out of Wastewater
Dr. Lynn Broaddus
Lynn Broaddus, Ph.D, M.B.A. is the 2020-21 president of the Water Environment Federation (WEF), an international organization of water quality professionals headquartered in Alexandria, VA. Lynn formed Broadview Collaborative Inc. in 2014 as a platform for advancing sustainable, resilient practices in the water sector. She serves as a strategic adviser and facilitator for private-sector, nonprofit and philanthropic clients throughout North America, and is known for bringing new ways of thinking to the crucial environmental challenges of our day.
Economics of Productive Sanitation in the U.S.
Roundtable Discussion
As the American Rescue Plan Act introduces a surge of funding for wastewater infrastructure with a short 4 year timeline, pre-existing technologies are prioritized over innovative ones, which require longer term investments in research and development. This discussion focuses on the challenges and opportunities for long-range funding for innovative wastewater technologies.
Dr. Pablo K. Cornejo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at California State University, Chico. Dr. Cornejo received his Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of South Florida (USF). His research focuses on the sustainability of water, wastewater, and integrated resource recovery systems; water and sanitation issues in the developing world; and sustainability-based engineering education.
Stacey Isaac Berahzer is a water project consultant with 19 years of experience. Through IB Environmental, she helps funders, nonprofits, utility companies, and communities fund and manage their water projects so they can make water clean and affordable. She specializes in policy related to water affordability and equity as well as stormwater and watershed management. She also has a background in Caribbean water issues. Stacey holds degrees in environmental science and in public administration. She facilitates the Georgia Funders’ Forum and chaired the board of the Institute for Georgia Environmental Leadership.
Bruce Douglas is the Wastewater Program Manager at the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation’s Drinking Water and Groundwater Protection Division. He has 38 years of national and international experience primarily focused on decentralized wastewater treatment and non-potable water reuse systems, including soil science, hydrogeology, design, construction, operation, maintenance and management. His role in the public sector has been focused on developing and implementing sound regulatory programs for potable water and onsite wastewater infrastructure.
Dr. Jay L. Garland joined the EPA’s Office of Research and Development in 2011. Dr. Garland received a Ph.D. in Environment Science from the University of Virginia and spent over 20 years working on NASA’s efforts to develop closed, bioregenerative life support systems for extended human spaceflight. His current efforts focus on advancing innovative approaches to water infrastructure, including decentralized water reuse, and mitigating risks associated with antimicrobial resistance in the water cycle.
Pipe Dream to Mainstream: Reporting on the Urine Revolution
Chelsea Wald
The Places We Go: Implementation Projects Around the World
Panel
Presentation of Toopi Organics: innovation and deployment program
Julien Saludas is R&D Director of Toopi organics. He is an agronomist, graduated from the Engineering School of Agronomy of Toulouse (INP-ENSAT).
Large-scale production of urine diverters for a household container-based sanitation service in Haiti
Jess Laporte is a member of the Research & Innovation Team at SOIL. Originally from Vermont, Jess has worked at the intersection of public health and social enterprise in Haiti since 2014 from clean water, to women’s health in the garment industry and eventually ecological sanitation with SOIL. Jess also holds a variety of roles in community-based, grassroots networks for Black, Indigenous and other people of color in Vermont and with Konbit Soley Leve in Haiti.
Decentralized Wastewater Treatment for a Green Future
Sybrand Metz is the technical director of Desah. He obtained his PhD at the university of Twente in 2003 on membrane science. After that he was senior scientific program manager at Wetsus, European centre of excellence of sustainable water technology till 2016. From 2014 – 2019 he was CTO at Metalmembranes and since December 2019 technical director of Desah.
Rich Earth Tools, LLC: Innovative technologies for capturing nutrients from source separated urine or blackwater
Kim Nace is the co-founder of Rich Earth Institute, and CEO of Rich Earth Tools, LLC. Creating circular water and nutrient cycles from human sanitary waste should be low hanging fruit, as we humans attempt to live within the boundaries of our eco-sphere. At Rich Earth, we recognize the need for new, efficient methods that capture and process high strength wastewater to better manage our precious, critical resources. In this presentation, Rich Earth Institute announces a new spin-off, Rich Earth Tools, LLC to bring a building scale treatment package to market.
Opportunities and Challenges of Installing a Urine-Diverting Toilet at the University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Kevin Orner joined the faculty of the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at West Virginia after working for two years as a postdoctoral researcher in environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Orner served for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Panama and was awarded a Fulbright Research grant in 2018.
Urine diversion and utilization in a populous urban setting
A retired family physician, Ole Ersson is co founder of Kailash Ecovillage, a sustainably focused intentional community. He has had an ongoing interest in ecological sanitation and published the Kailash Ecovillage project in the journal Blue Green Systems.
Socio-Technical Change for Urine Recycling
Panel
The project of urine diverting in the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul district (Paris 14e, France) – Presentation and perspectives
Aurélie Joveniaux, geographer, is researcher in the LEESU (Water, Environnement and Urban Systems Laboratory) at the Ecole des Ponts (France). She carries out work on the dynamics, brakes and levers around innovative projects of source separation of human excreta.
Bernard de Gouvello is researcher at the CSTB (Scientifical and Technical Center of the Building) and the LEESU – Ecole des Ponts. He studies innovations in water and sanitation management in the building and their impacts at the urban scale.
Fabien Esculier is a Ponts et Chaussées engineer. He coordinates the OCAPI research & action program in the LEESU – Ecole des Ponts, which aims at studying the contemporary mutations of nutrient flows, and the management of human nutrient excretion.
Why we need more technology developers to take part in socio-technical systems research on urine recycling
Prithvi Simha is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and CTO of Sanitation360 AB. His research focuses on urine chemistry, and he is developing the on-site technology – alkaline urine dehydration. In parallel, he also performs research to help identify drivers and barriers to new sanitation technologies and behaviors.
Social-Ecological-Systems Framework to Assess Adaptive Capacity for Regenerative Sanitation System
Hayley Joyell Smith is a PhD student in the Water Resources lab at University of Georgia. Her research is on the ethics, education, and systems thinking of wastewater systems. Hayley is a Director for the Board of PHLUSH (Public Hygiene Lets Us Stay Human).
Integrative research, nested risks and responsibilities, and opportunities for co-learning about urine nutrient reclamation
Tatiana Schreiber, Julia Cavicchi, Shaina Opperman, and Rebecca Hardin are collaborators on social research into urine recycling, as part a multi-year NSF-funded project between the Rich Earth Institute and University of Michigan.
Tatiana Schreiber is the social research director at the Rich Earth Institute, with a particular focus on working with and learning from farmers about their interests and needs.
Julia Cavicchi is a research associate at Rich Earth who supports our community engagement and education initiatives, including an annual home gardening program called “Urine My Garden.”
Shaina Opperman is a research assistant with the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability who supports the NSF-funded research project and Michigan Sustainability Cases Initiative.
Rebecca Hardin is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and was Co-Principal Investigator for the NSF grant.
Progress in Tech Research
Panel
State of the art of urine treatment technologies
Kai Udert has been working on nutrient recovery from urine for most of his career. His research is guided by the principles that human waste must be seen as a resource to replenish nutrients for food production and to prevent environmental pollution due to uncontrolled discharge.
Field Testing the Blue Diversion Autarky Urine Treatment
Michel Riechmann is an environmental engineer with a passion for toilets in all shapes and colors. For the past four years, he has been working at the Swiss water research institute Eawag, where he dedicates his time to the development of a novel on-site urine treatment technology.
Advancing the Design and Operating Conditions for Block Freeze Concentration of Urine-Derived Fertilizer
Abe-Noe-Hays is the Rich Earth Institute research Director. Ryan Homeyer was an ECO AmeriCorps service member with Rich Earth. They will present on findings about a new technology in development for concentrating urine fertilizer.
Stabilization of source-separated urine using electrochemically synthesized hydrogen peroxide
Dr. Sudeep Popat is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences at Clemson University. Dr. Popat’s primary research interests lie in application of anaerobic and electrochemical processes in resource recovery from wastewater. Dr. Popat’s current and prior work includes research in the areas of reductive dehalogenation of chlorinated ethenes, anaerobic digestion of municipal sludge, gas-phase bioreactors for biological removal of siloxanes, microbial fuel cells, and electrolysis-based processes for resource recovery from wastewater. Dr. Popat’s research has resulted in >30 peer-reviewed publications.
Successful application of nitritation/anammox to undiluted source-separated urine
Phillip Markus is an environmental engineer working at Eawag in Switzerland as a research assistant. Since 2019, he has been working on urine treatment processes for efficient nutrient recovery.
Recovering urea crystals from stabilized human urine
Dyllon Randall is a chemical engineer by training and is currently an Associate Professor in Water Quality Engineering and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He heads up the research group focusing on resource recovery from human urine.
Advancing Membrane Technologies for Phosphorous and Nitrogen Recovery from Human Urine
Stephanie McCartney is a 5th year PhD Student at Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering working in Dr. Ngai Yin Yip’s group. Stephanie’s focus is on nutrient recovery from human urine using membrane technologies. Upon graduation (expected in 2023) Stephanie plans to work in the wastewater treatment industry and is seeking opportunities.
Concentrating stabilized human urine using reverse osmosis to produce fertilizers
Caitlin Courtney is a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town supervised by Associate Professor Dyllon Randall. Her research focuses on using pressure driven membrane separation process to concentrate urine to produce a concentrated liquid fertilizer. Her research groups core focus is to valorize urine through resource recovery.
Waste*development: Separate Waste. Connect Communities.
Thor Retzlaff is a passionate entrepreneur, skilled storyteller, and avid mountaineer. He is the founder of waste*development, as well as the nonprofit organization, Do Good Sh*t. Since founding the nonprofit in 2018, he has orchestrated urine diversion toilet installations in Chile, Argentina, the United States, and Nepal. For the past year, the waste*development team has integrated source separation technology into portable toilets, and they look to position themselves as a collaborating force for source raw byproducts.
Lifecycle Assessments and Environmental Impacts
Panel
N2O emissions and carbon footprint of a urine treatment and fertilizer production system
Valentin Faust did his Master in Environmental Engineering at ETH Zurich in Switzerland with majors in urban water management and water resource management. In 2018, Faust started his PhD at Eawag supervised by Prof. Kai M. Udert focusing on partial urine nitrification. The PhD is part of ESA’s MELiSSA (Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative) program and is co-supervised by Prof. Ramon Ganigué and Prof. Siegfried E. Vlaeminck from UAntwerp.
Impact of source-separation of urine on effluent quality, energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of a decentralized wastewater treatment plant
Umakant Badeti is a PhD student at University of Technology Sydney in the school of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He has been working on source separation and nutrient recovery from urine and its effect on wastewater treatment plant as part of his PhD work.
Life Cycle Assessment of Urine Diversion and Conversion to Fertilizer Products at the City Scale
Dr. Nancy Love is Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation’s INFEWS project: Advancing Technologies and Improving Communication of Urine-Derived Fertilizers for Food Production within a Risk Based Framework. Dr. Love is the Borchardt and Glysson Collegiate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University Michigan, and an adjunct Professor at the Institute of Biotechnology at Addis Ababa University. In collaboration with her students, Dr. Love works at the interface of water, infrastructure and public health in both domestic and global settings.
Human urine in agriculture: various management options contributing to sustainable nitrogen fertilization
Tristan Martin is a post-doctoral researcher at INRAE (French national research institute for agriculture food and environment) near Paris. He studies the agronomic potential and the environmental impacts of urine-based fertilizers.
Agricultural Uses for Urine Fertilizer
Panel
Dry urine fertilizer: a field report
Jenna Senecal is a resource engineer with PhD in Safe Nutrient Recovery from Human Urine – System and Hygiene Evaluation. She is now working on the commercialization of the urine drying technology.
Human urine: A powerful climate change mitigation tool?
John Culpepper has been actively involved in the organics upcycling world for over four decades. He recently co-founded an initiative called Compost for Good, with the goal of helping individuals, organizations, and communities recognize the value of upcycling all organics. John has designed an open-sourced, community-scale, in-vessel composter that is receiving attention from around the world.
Trialing Urine Fertilizer on New Crops and Application Methods
Arthur Davis is Rich Earth’s Program Director and has assisted with many farm partnership research projects. He will report on Rich Earth’s latest farm partnership research, funded by the USDA SARE program, which included field trials on Vermont farms and lab experiments with drip fertigation.
Tatiana Schreiber is the social research director at the Rich Earth Institute, with a particular focus on working with and learning from farmers about their interests and needs.
Urine Fertilizer for Home Gardens: NPK Analysis and Application Methods
Renaud de Looze studied at the Polytechnic University of Brussels. In 1995, he founded the Palmeraie des Alpes, a nursery in Isère (France). He has always experimented with techniques for recycling organic waste and wastewater as fertilizer in the garden and agricultural field. In 2016, following his investigations, he wrote a book “L’urine de l’or liquide au jardin“. With original illustrations by designer Paul Avoine, this book explains how urine can be used as an effective and natural fertilizer. More than just instructions for the home gardener, this book gives information on the legal status and agronomic value of urine, the impact of salt on plants grown with urine, how to fertilize without polluting.
Solar-Dripper Evolutions and 2021 Taste Tests
Robert Cossette is an engineer and eco-entrepreneur born in Montreal, Canada. He now lives in France and is the inventor of the ORIAZ Solar-Dripper.
Gold Ribbon Commission Update
Pat Lando presented an update on the Gold Ribbon Commission‘s progress in streamlining a regulatory pathway for beneficial urine reuse in the US. Pat Lando is the executive Director of Recode; a nonprofit organization that creates and promotes regulations and policies for climate change solutions which includes sustainable and equitable water systems.
Global Partnerships for Urine Reclamation
Panel
Rebecca Nelson is a Professor at the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She is a co-organizer of The Soil Factory Network (SFN) is an emerging community of practice (CoP) that aims to stimulate the recovery of resources from wastes to agriculture.
Kory Russel is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon where he teaches courses on sustainable and human-centered design, courses on water, sanitation and public health, as well as course in Environmental Studies. He has conducted extensive research internationally including in Haiti and Mozambique.
William Tarpeh is an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University. He leads a research group focused on designing and evaluating novel separations to recover valuable products from wastewaters. Will completed his B.S. in chemical engineering at Stanford, his M.S. and Ph.D. in environmental engineering at UC Berkeley, and postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan in environmental engineering. Will has recently been honored as an Environmental Science & Technology Early Career Scientist, Forbes’ “30 Under 30” 2019 Science List, Gulf Research Program Early Career Fellowship, and Chemical and Engineering News Talented 12.