Boomtown festival in Hampshire, southern England, is famous for its elaborate stages, costumed street performers, and elaborate parallel-universe storytelling. It is now also famous for something else: contributing its visitors' urine to a forestry project. NPK Recovery — a female-founded startup based at Future Space, the enterprise hub of UWE Bristol (the University of the West of England, Bristol) — collected urine from 700 Boomtown festivalgoers in 2025, processing it through a mobile on-site laboratory that uses bacteria to extract nitrogen and other nutrients, converting what might politely be called "festival output" into 540 litres (143 gallons) of genuinely effective, completely odourless plant fertiliser.
The result is being used to grow 4,500 native trees — including beech and Scots pine — on the edge of the Brecon Beacons in Wales, in partnership with Stump Up for Trees, a local charity that is halfway to its target of planting one million trees in the national park. The project has received a £435,627 (around US$548,000) grant from the UK's Forestry Commission through its Tree Production Innovation Fund.
NPK Recovery co-founder Lucy Bell-Reeves has described it as a "circular solution." The fertiliser, she notes, is as effective as conventional synthetic alternatives — which are energy-intensive to produce and increasingly expensive. Her assessment of the raw material supply is refreshingly practical: the world is not about to run out of urine.