Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** the project circular soils for city…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** the project circular soils for city spaces aims to find socially, environmentally and economically viable pathways to enhancing urban and peri-urban food production systems by turning organic underutilized resources (OURS) into productive resources that reduce financial and environmental burdens on both producers and consumers. A variety of wasted or underutilized organic materials (by-products of the food system, urban and suburban landscapes, and the built environment) could be used to produce nutrient-rich plant growth media and carbon-rich fertilizers to support urban and peri-urban food production. We are particularly interested in serving the needs of urban community gardeners and peri-urban growers who are spatially positioned to take advantage of complementary urban and rural OURS to produce nutritious food for urban populations. The work will build on the principles of circular economy, which aims to shift economic systems from a linear take-make-waste model to one that minimizes waste, keeps materials in circulation, and regenerates nature. Our proposal's central proposition is to develop the theoretical, technical, and social basis for the production of OURS-based horticultural media and fertilizer products, with urine as a key source of nutrients for peri-urban crop production.there is tremendous potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce costs, build soil health, and diversify diets through the application of circular economy principles to agriculture. The food system (including production, consumption and post-consumption stages) is associated with pollution, resource degradation and an enormous carbon footprint. Food production is vulnerable to unstable and rising energy prices because of its dependency on fossil fuel-based synthetic nitrogen (SYNN). Implementation of the circular bionutrient economy (CBE) through linking management of organic wastes to production of soil amendments and plant growth media could solve some of the sustainability challenges associated with agriculture, food waste and sanitation. Reducing agriculture's dependency on synthetic nitrogen would have numerous CO-benefits for health, the environment, and biodiversity.one way to reduce the use of SYNN in agriculture is through better use of human excreta. Human urine is typically free of pathogens and contains most of the nitrogen that people consume, in plant-friendly forms, as well as many of the other nutrients that plants require. Around half of municipal biosolids are used for soil amendment, but only a small fraction of the nutrients in excreta are present in biosolids, and biosolids may be contaminated with industrial effluents and other hazardous materials. Crop production in urban and peri-urban (UPU) areas can benefit from immediate proximity to vast quantities of human-derived nitrogen. If the nutrients in urine can be efficiently captured and concentrated in a format suited to local usage or to long-distance transport, sanitation, approaches could shift from a focus on problem solving to the purpose of resource utilization, with benefits for food, feed, fiber production and other areas in which soil health is important, such as municipal plantings and golf courses.a substantial shift away from our food system's dependency on SYNN fertilizer is ambitious, and faces a range of obstacles, including technical, socio-cultural and regulatory challenges. Collecting urine and using IT for fertigation and/or to produce fertilizers are not entirely new propositions, but their application in urban and peri-urban horticulture is currently negligible. The oldest and largest community PEE-cycling program in the USA, carried out at the rich earth institute in brattleboro, VT (with whom we collaborate on another project), provides an example of how this can be conducted in a specific context. The present proposal aims to complement their work with the development of urine-based fertilization options for raised-bed horticulture in another small city (ithaca, NY) and in a larger one (rochester, NY).the proposed work will work at nested scales to assess the potential of CBE and identify potential entry points. We will determine the quality, quantity, and distribution of available OURS in the USA, and then examine the potential dynamics in greater detail in the two contrasting cities (ithaca and rochester, NY, in their larger geographic contexts). In parallel, we will develop practical methods for utilizing high-carbon OURS (particularlymaize stover), in combination with urine as a nitrogen source, together with other OURS. In this work, we will tackle two technical challenges: (1) the optimization of plant production using horticultural media made from OURS and fertigated with sanitized and diluted urine, and (2) the at-source capture of nutrients from urine onto specialized biochars in public toilets located at urban gardens and other public places. To advance these technologies into action, we will engag