From the Stands to the Soil: How stadium urine could revolutionize European agriculture
Swedish football fans are being recruited for an unusual environmental mission this year. Eleda Stadion, home ground of Malmö FF, opened its doors—and its toilets—for an initiative with an ambitious target: collecting 1,000 liters of human urine to help wean Sweden off imported synthetic fertilizers.
Why urine?
As explained here, nitrogen-based synthetic fertilizers are a major but often overlooked climate culprit. According to research by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), they produce 1.13 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalents each year — roughly 2.1% of total global emissions and around 11% of agricultural emissions — surpassing the entire aviation sector’s emissions by 23%. Beyond their carbon footprint, these fossil fuel-based products have become increasingly vulnerable to geopolitical disruption. Iran’s ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—a critical chokepoint for both fertilizer trade and natural gas shipments—has stalled roughly a third of the global fertilizer supply, raising serious concerns about food security worldwide.
Human urine, by contrast, is a freely available and renewable source of the three nutrients plants need most: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium — the very same ingredients that make synthetic fertilizers effective. And this is far from a new idea: records show urine was used as an effective fertilizer in ancient China and Rome, long before industrial farming took hold.
The science behind the stadium
The initiative—formally known as Pee for the Planet—is a two-year research project funded by Formas and supported by the City of Malmö and VA Syd, one of Sweden’s largest wastewater organizations. It brings together the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), oat milk pioneer Oatly, Malmö FF, and sanitation technology company Sanitation360.
Professor Björn Vinnerås of SLU and Sanitation360 frames the concept simply: “It’s about making use of a resource we currently waste. We also need to challenge the way we think, because collecting and reusing urine is really no stranger than doing the same with plastic. Today, we already use manure from cows, pigs, and chickens as fertilizer—and that is completely normalized.”
A living laboratory
Eleda Stadion has been fitted with 11 urinals and one urine-collecting toilet inside the arena, plus four mobile unisex urinals near the entrance outside. The 22,500-capacity stadium will serve as a live testing ground—evaluating not only the technology itself but also hygiene protocols, logistical feasibility, and crucially, public willingness to embrace the idea. No behavior change is required from supporters; they simply use the bathroom as usual, while a food-grade stabilizer is added during collection to preserve nutrients and prevent odor.
One key question the research aims to answer is whether urine-derived fertilizer is safe for use on food crops, given legitimate concerns around pharmaceutical residues and pathogens that must be resolved before any large-scale rollout. Unlike human feces, urine is comparatively straightforward to process: it contains lower levels of heavy metals and pathogens, making it safer and more cost-effective to treat.
From urine to Granurin: How it works
Once collected, the urine doesn’t simply get sprayed on a field. It is dried in closed containers, blended with by-products from Oatly’s oat drink production, and transformed into pellets called Granurin—a granular fertilizer that farmers can handle using their existing equipment and workflows.
The choice of pellets over liquid urine is deliberate. Storing thousands of liters of liquid would require enormous tanks and complex logistics, eating into the environmental gains. Drying concentrates the nutrients—Granurin contains around 15% nitrogen, comparable to mineral fertilizers—making it easier to store, transport, and apply with precision. The pellets are dry, odorless, and hygienic, releasing nutrients slowly and reducing environmental impact compared to synthetic alternatives.
Oatly also aims to explore growing oats using Granurin at a test farm in Sweden—a true farm-to-table-to-field circular loop.
A vision for the future
If successful, the project could pave the way for redesigned toilet infrastructure capable of capturing urine at scale — in stadiums, public venues, and beyond. It could also tackle a secondary environmental problem: excess nutrients currently flushed into wastewater systems contribute to eutrophication, particularly in the Baltic Sea, where nutrient pollution is a long-standing ecological concern. Unlike the diffuse runoff from animal agriculture, these centralised toilet systems make nutrient capture far more controllable.
Researchers estimate that urine could theoretically substitute up to 30% of the synthetic fertilizer currently used across Sweden. Looking further ahead, the team also hopes to explore whether consumers would be willing to buy food grown with circularly sourced, urine-derived nutrients. This cultural shift may prove just as challenging as the science itself.
The core message is straightforward: one of the most promising solutions to a global fertilizer crisis may have been with us—and inside us—all along.