The toilet is the start. The soil is the return.
Humanure becomes high-value compost. Urine becomes stable odorless fertilizer. And humans become free of the costs and constraints of conventional sanitation.
Humanure → finished compost.
After composting, what was waste becomes a Class A or B soil amendment. Safe. Stable. Valuable. Operators are already selling it by the truckload to landscapers, land-reclamation projects, and farms.
Urine → reverse-osmosis fertilizer.
Source-separated urine is the most nutrient-dense fertilizer humans produce. When stabilized and concentrated via reverse osmosis — the same proven tech that turns seawater into drinking water — urine can be used as NPK-rich liquid plant food, with clean water as the other output.
PeeCycling
UCT spin-out. Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation shortlist, 2026.
Prof. Dyllon Randall · Dr. Caitlin Courtney · Anna Reid (CTO)
Virro is collaborating with Prof. Randall and the UCT Future Water Institute on integrating PeeCycling reverse-osmosis concentration into Virro commercial sites — turning sanitation into nutrient recovery without phase-change energy loss.
Read the research →The nutrients one person excretes in a year can grow the same amount of grain that person needs to eat. A perfect closed loop.
Read the research