To pee or not to pee should not be the question!
What happens after we flush the toilet? A new policy brief by Isabel Froes argues that wastewater, human feces and urine should not be seen as a waste but rather as valuable resources that can help close nutrient loops, reduce relience on imported fertilizers, and support a more circular economy.
The concept of waste does not exist in nature. Nature turns one output into another input, then calls the loop complete. Human development, by contrast, has built a sanitation system that behaves like a one-way street. The result is a very expensive habit: We flush nitrogen, phosphorus, and water, then pay again to replace them.
This is why the current regulatory picture matters. Fertilising rules and sanitation rules were designed for a linear world. They do a decent job of setting safety boundaries, but they still leave behind a blind spot around treated human excreta and recovered water. In practice, that blindspot turns promising circular products into awkward outsiders. The system knows the products can be safe. The law often does not know what to do with them.
In her new policy brief Isabel Froes, together with P2Green, argues for a simple shift: stop treating sanitation as an end-of-pipe liability and start treating it as a resource system. Existing pilots already show that the technology is possible. What stands in the way is not chemistry. It is plumbing, law, and habit. Policy makers should do three things now:
First, make resource-recovery-ready plumbing the default in new public buildings and major retrofits. Second, remove legal bottlenecks that keep recovered nutrients and purified side-stream water stuck in limbo. Third, finance the transition with incentives, standards, and training so municipalities, installers, and developers can actually build the future they keep promising.
Europe likes to call itself green. Sanitation is where this claim either becomes real or gets flushed away. The system already contains the nutrients, the water, and the circular logic. What it lacks is a policy architecture that treats recovery as normal rather than novel.
The choice is not between hygeine and circularity. It is between keeping the pipe blocked and openeing it up for a future that wastes less, recovers more, and builds value where today we see only disposal. The fruits are ready to be picked. Let the harvest begin.
Read more about Senior Advisor Isabel Froes on her profile page and view her publications here.
Further reading on circular sanitation
The Guardian
The Swiss startup company, VunaNexus, have created special toilet that filters human excreta to create distilled water and liquid fertilizer called 'Aurin'. Read more about it here:
Food Planet Prize Organization
The Swedish start up company, Sanitation360, has created a circular sanitation system that captures and recycles nitrogen and phosphorus in urine to create a sustainable fertilizer. Read more about it here:
P2Green
In an effort to reduce waste of nutrients and pollution, P2Green aims to foster a paradigm shift that links blue urban infrastructure with green rural infrastructure, by following the 3R principle: 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle'. Read more about it here: