Festival season is in full swing, and like any self-respecting plant and soil biogeochemist attending a local music festival, I’m curious how those occasions might adjust vital nutrient cycles.
With crowds gathering in the fields, eating food and drink, and then excreting them in, say, less-than-ideal facilities, extra nutrients from urine and feces can easily escape into the environment.
This human being wastes significant amounts of two macronutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus. Other human activities, such as the use of fertilizers, sewage overflows and the burning of fossil fuels, also lead to significant releases of nitrogen and phosphorus to soil, air and water, causing ecological imbalances, disturbances in water quality water and biodiversity loss. Research suggests that humans have altered those nutrient cycles enough to threaten the long-term habitability of our planet.
So, how much nitrogen and phosphorus do festival-goers produce?Urine is more likely than poop not to be fully captured in the festival restrooms, so I focused on urine. On a typical day, a user produces about 11 g of nitrogen and 1 g of phosphorus in their urine. At a festival, other people tend to eat and drink more, but for this calculation I assumed that everyone jingles on average.
Around 40,000 punters and 5,000 staff attended my local music festival, Kendal Calling, in the Lake District last August. The site covers approximately 800 hectares, adding campsites. Over four days, Kendal Calling festival-goers removed around two tonnes of nitrogen. This is around 2. 5kg per hectare, or around a quarter of what enters England’s natural grasslands through rainfall and the environment each year. However, this is much less than the 50 kg of nitrogen per hectare or more that farmers can add to agricultural grasslands in a year.
Much of the urine is captured in the festival toilets; Fortunately, it does not reach the ground completely. To assess how other people might urinate outdoors instead of using the bathroom, I asked ten of my friends and fellow festivalgoers. Even if only one in five whistles were done naturally, this represents 5% of the atmosphere’s average annual nitrogen dose.
Conservative estimates of how festival-goers urinate outdoors were used to calculate how much nitrogen and phosphorus can be added to the festival grounds. Milkovasa/Shutterstock
What happens next? Depending on soil conditions, rainfall, and temperature, nitrogen can be released into the environment as ammonia fuel or nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse fuel, it can be released into meters of water in the form of nitrates or absorbed through plant roots. Therefore, it can pollute the air or water, warm our environment, or promote plant growth.
During this festival, people produced approximately 0. 22 five kg of phosphorus per hectare. This is equivalent to the annual value of phosphorus that is removed from the environment in just 4 days, much more than nitrogen. However, the typical fertilizer application rate for an agriculturally controlled grassland is much higher, more than five kg per hectare.
Phosphorus has a different cycle than nitrogen because it does not convert smoothly to a gas. It adheres strongly to the soil surface, so soils may be over-enriched with phosphorus. If soil conditions are not well controlled, the soil erodes and phosphorus-rich sediments end up in waterways, or heavy rain moves dissolved phosphates from urine into waterways.
Rivers, lakes and oceans are ecologically susceptible to phosphorus levels, and those extra nutrients can simply lead to algae blooms. When this happens, algae grow rapidly, blocking sunlight and reducing oxygen levels in the water, affecting and killing other aquatic life.
Number One Points to Pee
My back-of-the-envelope calculations recommend that a few days of festival may result in a small addition of nutrients to the entire site compared to the amount it receives over the course of a year.
In reality, wild herbs are not distributed lightly at the festival site, but are concentrated in specific hotspots. Nitrogen and phosphorus levels are likely to be much higher at hotspots than in natural conditions, with a higher risk of disruption of nutrient cycles and environmental damage.
These unmanaged chemical flows can also have other consequences. Urea can simply modify the pH of soils. Other, more exotic ingredients may appear in the urine of the average festival-goer, with unknown effects on worms and the billions of microbes discovered in healthy soil.
My recommendation to festival-goers is to urinate in a doorway, preferably in the hole and not all over the floor. To the festival organizers, please provide beautiful sinks, even composting sinks or other cutting-edge solutions. At Glastonbury, other people are actively involved Outdoor urination is discouraged and organisers are testing tactics to recycle those valuable human-derived nutrients.
Even with smart facilities, chances are there will still be hot spots of smelly nutrients at the festival site once everyone has gone home. Take care of soils before, during, and after an occasion to decrease the amount of nutrients escaping and perhaps move the location of key infrastructure (bars, bathrooms, and stages) from year to year to prevent the buildup of those nutrient hotspots over time.
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