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Waving Goodbye & Hello to Long Island Sound Funding
The Rich Earth team with the storage tank for a Brattleboro business' urine diverting toilet installation.
We’re grateful for ongoing funding for our community-scale peecycling work from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Long Island Sound Futures Fund. We’ve wrapped up our project expanding implementation in Windham County, VT and are preparing to launch a new project planning for a new community-scale project in Franklin County, MA.
Concluding 2023-2025 Windham County, VT Implementation Grant
Through this grant, we:
- Increased our urine donor network, celebrating our community of urine donors, welcoming newcomers into the fold, and energizing new urine donors at our second urine depot in Bellows Falls, VT
- Expanded educational programming through collaboration with over 58 local organizations, including: Connecticut River Conservancy, the Wild Goose Players’s production of Urinetown in Bellows Falls, exhibiting at many local festivals, and seeding new partnerships in MA to lay the groundwork for our next project
- Installed new urine diversion systems in 28 more homes and 8 more businesses, expanding our growing network of peecycling toilets – with more on the way! Highlights include Retreat Farm’s new Event Barn, the Putney School (featuring Golden Funnel Award recipient Louise Raguet’s Marcelle flown to us from France by our 2023 Rich Earth Summit Keynote speaker Fabian Esculier). Through this work, we pioneered new permitting pathways for urine diversion installations, setting a precedent that other states can replicate, and easing access to UD toilets for Vermonters.
Launching 2026-2027 Franklin County, MA Planning Grant
We’re excited to explore expanding our nutrient cycling work across the border into Massachusetts because it:
- Synergizes with advancements in regulatory pathways for urine recycling being made on Cape Cod; our planning work in these two watersheds impacted by nutrient pollution will be mutually beneficial.
- Connects with a community eager to implement urine recycling to bolster a thriving local food scene with a rare source of local nutrients
- Supports efforts to create more affordable housing in Franklin County. Our project will include a focus on toilet installation site visits, including for developments that are currently stymied by lack of wastewater capacity; in MA compost toilets can enable a 50% reduction in leachfield size (compared to only 25% allowed in VT) unlocking new housing options.
We’d like to extend a huge thank you to all the Franklin County individuals and organizations we’ve worked with that helped this project come together. So many of you participated in our community conversations, and informed this project design; we’ll be reaching out to connect in the coming months.
Want to get involved? We’re seeking prospective urine donors, farmers, depot sites, urine processing sites, urine diversion toilets and/or compost toilet installation sites, communicators, and more! Share your interest in this form.
