#HTE

An Eco-Friendly Way to Dispose of Urine Collected at Music Festivals

Hendrix fans often say how cool it would have been to attend Woodstock, but all I can think about is how gross the bathrooms must’ve been. Four hundred thousand muddy, pee- and poo-filled hippies tramping in and out of a handful of portable toilets? Plus, I’m no expert on psychedelics, but I’m pretty sure that tripping balls doesn’t exactly turn you into a marksman. Peace and love aside, those Port-A-Potties had to be a small-scale ecological disaster.

When it comes to getting rid of human waste at music festivals, portable chem-toilets are usually the solution. But French industrial design firm Faltazi has proposed an alternate, more natural solution call the Uritonnoir that’s made from little more than bales of hay. There are no chemicals involved save for the ones in our bodies, and the waste, if properly managed, turns into compost.

To create a Uritonnoir, the installer cuts triangular apertures into bales of hay with a chainsaw.

The bales then have recyclable, washable polypropylene funnels inserted into them.

The festivalgoer pees into this funnel, saturating the hay with golden goodness.

The developers reckon that locking the pee up in straw will prevent it from turning into ammonia, and keeping the whole thing in the shade will prevent the urine from evaporating. Instead, the plan is that the nitrogen in one’s pee will react with the carbon in the straw to break it down. When the bales are hauled off after the festival…

…they are placed in the sun. Properly aerated, the bundle eventually becomes compost.

Admittedly it’s far from a perfect design. For starters, women must use an additional device to route the urine, making it an awkward affair for them, and it’s not clear how toilet paper is provided.

Also, there is no provision for #2; the pee-bale takes anywhere from six months to a year to break down; and the designers say a single Uritonnoir can handle just 60 users for two to three days before the smell begins to become a problem. (Woodstock’s 400,000 attendees would have necessitated some 6,700 Uritonnoirs.) But at least Faltazi is taking the trouble to investigate ecologically-responsible ways to dispose of urine on a mass scale. Coachella, in contrast, has simply installed conventional bathrooms, where the pee will go where it usually does: Into our sewage system, and eventually into our waterways.