For all its crap, the US is not doing much with it.
Wasted, a start-up based in Burlington, Vermont, is hoping to change that. The three-year-old company collects human waste from portable toilets and transports it to a processing center, where the excrement is treated through a nutrient recovery process to create fertilizer.
On Wednesday, Wasted announced US$7.5 million in seed-stage funding from investors that include Collaborative Fund, Divergent Capital, Day One Ventures, Third Sphere, Pure Ventures and Gratitude Railroad.
Photo: Reuters
The funding is to go to Wasted’s first pilot program, involving 200 porta potties on construction sites in Burlington. Solid waste from the retrofitted toilets would be transported to a nearby facility in Williston to be processed into a nitrogen-rich fertilizer aimed at reducing the phosphorus run-off that creates algae bloom on Lake Champlain.
“What we’re building through the porta potty industry is distributed, climate-resilient sanitation that can be deployed everywhere that it’s needed,” Wasted cofounder and CEO Brophy Tyree said.
Wasted’s porta potties — which at US$200 cost about as much as the traditional version, according to Tyree — are part of what is known as “container-based sanitation.” It is a catch-all term for toilet systems that collect human waste in containers, then transport the excreta for processing at treatment facilities.
Photo: AP
As a cost-effective solution in densely populated cities and countries with limited sewage infrastructure, turning waste into fertilizer is attracting the attention of start-ups in Europe, including Sweden’s Sanitation 360 and France’s Toopi Organics. Tyree’s goal is to bring the idea to the US.
“We chose to do it here because it’s not currently being done here,” Tyree said. “We saw the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of giants who really pioneered it in other countries.”
For locales with sewage systems in place, the draw of container-based sanitation is environmental. Such systems generally use less water, and converting human waste into fertilizer is particularly useful amid inflated fertilizer prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Another selling point is having a bathroom environment that smells better, Tyree said.
Cofounded in 2020 by Tyree, Taylor Zehren and Thor Retzlaff, Wasted grew out of a nonprofit called Do Good Shit, which the founding team launched in 2018 after noticing exorbitant amounts of human waste during mountaineering trips. Do Good Shit provides toilets and other sanitation facilities near popular outdoor destinations.
Wasted is starting with an equally narrow focus, but has big plans. The start-up is eyeing other venues with portable toilets — including camping sites, concerts and outdoor events — and looking to expand into a second city next year.
Wasted plans to tailor its fertilizer to local needs and has also filed a patent for a toilet that can parse liquids from solids, Tyree said.
First, though, Wasted must overcome the “ick factor.”
While the company has many international examples to look to, Cornell University biologist Rebecca Nelson said it might struggle to introduce container-based sanitation to US consumers.
In that respect, the dearth of US competition could help. Cities such as Chicago and Tacoma, Washington, already have programs that produce fertilizer from sewage waste, but Wasted has few direct competitors in the container-based sanitation space.
“That’s why it’s an opportunity. There’s a lot of value on the table,” Nelson said. “It’s straight up nutrient value.”
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
Chinese entrepreneur Frank Gao used to spend long hours running his social media accounts but now outsources the chore to artificial intelligence (AI) agent tool OpenClaw, which is taking China by storm despite official warnings over cybersecurity. OpenClaw, created in November by an Austrian coder, differs from bots such as ChatGPT because it can execute real-life tasks such as sending e-mails, organizing files or even booking flight tickets. “Since January, I’ve spent hours on the lobster every day,” Gao said in an interview, referring to OpenClaw’s red crustacean mascot. “We’re family.” After downloading OpenClaw, users connect it to artificial intelligence models of their
At a massive shipyard in North Vancouver, Canadian workers grind metal beams for a powerful new icebreaker crucial to cementing the country’s presence in the increasingly contested arctic. Icebreakers are specialized, expensive vessels able to navigate in the frozen far north. And “this is the crown jewel,” said Eddie Schehr, vice president of production at the Seaspan shipyard. For Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who heads to Norway next Friday to observe arctic defense drills involving troops from 14 NATO states, Canada’s extreme north has emerged as a strategic priority. “Canada is and forever will be an Arctic nation,” he said ahead of
RSS