Urine from hundreds of festival goers was saved from sewage and turned into fertiliser at Boomtown Festival.
NPK Recovery piloted their urine to fertiliser system at Boomtown festival, August 6-10. Collaborating with ComPOOst solutions, the NPK team converted urine from compost toilets into fertiliser – a first at a UK event. Watch a video from the pilot on Linkedin.
NPK Recovery use bacteria to recover naturally occurring nutrients from the urine, creating a liquid fertiliser. Around 1800 litres of urine were processed onsite at Boomtown Festival, with the NPK Recovery team connecting their novel unit to a block of toilets used by 700 festival goers. During the festival, NPK Recovery’s mobile unit turned the urine into 540 litres of fertiliser product, which will be used in 2026 trials.
Lucy Bell-Reeves, product manager for NPK Recovery explains: ‘Large-scale outdoor events generate vast volumes of wastewater in a very short time, often in rural or peri-urban locations with limited infrastructure.
The traditional way of dealing with human waste is tankering it offsite for treatment, which leads to nutrients in urine being lost rather than re-used.
Urine doesn’t have to be a waste product – our pilot showed we can recover 100% of the nitrogen that enters our system, instead of this nitrogen making it’s way to wastewater treatment’
The NPK Recovery team worked with AGF (A Greener Future) to measure the environmental performance of the pilot. AGF is an award-winning not-for-profit company, dedicated to helping events, festivals, tours and venues to be more sustainable and to reduce environmental impacts.
A review by AGF found the Boomtown pilot demonstrated that it is technically feasible to generate a usable fertiliser product from festival waste streams. And, whilst the direct carbon savings measured during the trial were modest, the pilot showed clear potential to avoid emissions through nutrient substitution, reduced tanker transport and avoided wastewater treatment. These CO₂ savings, while small in absolute terms at pilot scale, indicate that decentralised urine treatment can deliver tangible benefits when integrated into broader sustainability strategies.
NPK Recovery’s next steps are to refine their nutrient recovery technology, before exploring further pilots in 2026.
