Here to reimagine human “waste”

In 2019, the founders came together around a mission to catalyze the global transition to circular sanitation and change the way people think about waste.

The sanitation industry needed a revolution.

The Wasted* founders came together through a series of mountaineering expeditions in the backcountry of the Arctic, Patagonia, Nepal, and in their backyard of Lake Tahoe. On these adventures, we were exposed to the human waste crisis happening in our pristine natural ecosystems — where untreated waste was leaking from pits into the surrounding environment.

We decided to start one.

Inspired to leave these awe-inspiring places better than we found them, we hatched a plan to tackle the can. A two-year search for sustainable sanitation ensued. Surveying, installing, servicing, disassembling, and reassembling toilets, we strove to understand the problem and recognize a viable solution.

In search of a solution, we understood scale was required, and quickly. The problem is far greater than we had ever imagined: in our portable sanitation infrastructure, 32 billion gallons of water is being wasted, and over 6 billion gallons of human waste is being unsustainably treated.

We also learned that our waste carries the nutrients needed to grow food — nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium — and that if we can keep pee and poo separate, we can transform our waste into fertilizer.

Out of those core insights, Wasted* was born.