Jean Zeid 06:53, March 5, 2024
Every morning, Jean Zeid delivers the best in terms of innovation.
This Tuesday, he is interested in the innovation of the company Toopi Organics which relies on urine to replace fertilizer.
This Tuesday morning, a company is banking on urine to do without fertilizers.
It's time to turn up the volume for parents.
Pee poo is timeless among kids, take advantage of it.
Making urine an agricultural biostimulant is the idea of Toopi Organics, a company created in 2019 in Loupiac-de-la-Réole, between Bordeaux and Agen.
If you were passing through the Paris Agricultural Show, you may have discovered these signs at the entrance to the 46 urinals and mobile toilets installed for the event: here we “collect human urine and dispose of it”. is used to grow bacteria which will replace fertilizers.
After all, farmers already use slurry.
What is the innovation here?
First of all, it's not "peeing in your vegetable garden", which can work, but the principle here is different.
For what ?
“Because urine doesn't contain enough nutrients to nourish plants, that doesn't work.
On the other hand, this pee, so popular in children's discussions, constitutes a culture medium for cultivating other micro-organisms of agronomic interest, micro-organisms capable of promoting the emergence of phosphorus and nitrogen, both to nourish the plant and protect it from water stress.
Water preservation, fertilizer consumption, soil quality, carbon footprint and agricultural productivity, that's not bad for a liquid intended for the toilet.
Every year, in European toilets, more than 200 billion liters of urine go down the drain or into septic tanks, with more than 6,000 billion liters of drinking water.
And she commercialized her idea?
Yes, two years ago with Lactopi Start available in France and Belgium.
The first urine-based biostimulant to be authorized in organic farming and can partially replace chemical fertilizers up to 50%.
The company has just raised more than €8M to develop its concept more widely.
Objective: industrialize is the buzzword.
It will be able to set up more than a hundred trials in Europe: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Italy.
In 2023, Toopi Organics claims to have collected the urine of nearly two million Europeans.
The company which has already established partnerships with companies or sites such as Futuroscope in Poitiers, music festivals such as Hellfest, Rock-en Seine or Solidays, Autoroutes Vinci areas and agricultural events such as the Salon de l 'Agriculture.
Its first large-scale industrial site will be operational in France next year, in 2025.