It is easier to believe that money can be made from city’s trash to animal waste. If one can go by the reports from Trichy, a district of Tamil Nadu, India; a non-governmental organization is paying people to use the public urinal and uses the output as bio-fertiliser. There are plenty of ‘pay and use’ toilets in Trichy, but if one uses the Ecosan Community Compost Toilet (ECCT), one is remunerated for the services.
Society for Community Organisation and Peoples’ Education (SCOPE) has started paying the users 10 paise per visit to the ECCT from January 2008. The accumulated amount will be paid to all the card-holders who use the ECCT on a monthly basis. The first public urinal has been functioning since last 18 months, thus becomes the first and one of a kind in the world. Every fortnight, on an average 250 liters of urine is collected and the same is used for agricultural purposes. Since a year ago, the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) has signed an MOU with SCOPE to study the use of urine as liquid fertilizer. WASTE, an agency from the Netherlands has made available $10,000 for the two year research project.
Already countries including Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, France and China have begun to use urine as liquid fertilizer for farming purposes. TNAU claims that the research to this area is showing great promise with urine being used for a variety of crops. The study includes, applying crops with different dosages of urine and monitoring closely to record the developments.
The major deterrent to the project is the non-availability of sizable amount of urine which could be used without protracting the study. The shortage is due to majority of men found relief through alfresco methods. The director of SCOPE, M. Subburaman avers that over 65% of the population relieve themselves in the open and hopes such initiatives will attract men to start a new habit. Hopefully, this pilot project of ‘use and be paid’ toilets catches on in India soon.