The Vermont company that looked at a porta-potty and saw a fertilizer factory.
It is a Saturday in a muddy Vermont field, and a line of people is waiting for a toilet. Nothing about this is remarkable - except the toilet. It uses no water. It has no sewer line, no tank of blue chemicals, no ripe midsummer smell. A small solar panel hums on top. Somebody has painted a star on the side. When the day ends and the crowd goes home, what they leave behind will not be trucked to a treatment plant and forgotten. It will be driven to a lab, separated, and coaxed back into something a farmer would actually pay for. That is the whole idea, and it is a strange one: the waste is the product.
This is Wasted* PBC - the asterisk is not a typo, it is a wink - a public benefit corporation headquartered in Williston, Vermont. The company rents chemical-free, waterless, urine-diverting toilets to construction sites, music festivals, parks, and vacation rentals. Then it does the part nobody else bothers with: it recovers the nutrients locked inside human waste and turns them into fertilizer. The flagship product is called WeeBloom, and yes, the name means exactly what you think.
Most companies would rather you not think about any of this. Wasted* has built a brand on making you think about it - and, improbably, making you smile while you do. Their Instagram cheerfully announces, "Bing, bop, boom - we turn pee into fertilizer." Their org chart lists two dogs. Their core values are Biophilia, Reverence, and Fun. It is the rare climate startup where the joke and the science point in the same direction.
We turn pee into fertilizer.- Wasted* PBC, saying the quiet part loud
The founders did not set out to be in the toilet business. Taylor Zehren, Thor Retzlaff, and Brophy Tyree came together around 2019 through a string of mountaineering expeditions - the Arctic, Patagonia, Nepal, the backcountry near Lake Tahoe. On those trips they kept running into the same ugly detail in the most beautiful places on earth: untreated human waste, leaking from pits into pristine ecosystems. The mountains were the marketing department nobody hired. The problem followed them home.
In 2020 the idea took a first form as a nonprofit with an unprintable-in-polite-company name, Do Good Sh*t, whose mission was to bring dignified, sustainable sanitation to ecologically sensitive places. A nonprofit can raise awareness. It struggles to raise a fleet of toilets. So the team spun up a company that could scale the hardware, recover the nutrients, and - crucially - sell the results. Wasted* was born, and it kept the nonprofit's irreverence intact.
The portable toilet has been essentially the same object for half a century: a plastic box, a tank, a dose of chemicals, a familiar smell. Wasted* pulled it apart. Their units divert urine from solids at the source, run on solar-powered ventilation, and need no water, electricity, sewer connection, or chemicals to work. The company describes building the most robust urine-diversion dry toilet in the world, alongside a Conveyor toilet system engineered so there are no odors, no noises, and no residual waste in view. There is a standalone Donation Station for parks, farms, and trailheads with no plumbing for miles, and a premium VIPee restroom trailer for events that want the upgrade.
Separating waste at the source is the unglamorous key to everything downstream. Mix urine and solids together and you get sewage - a problem. Keep them apart and you get raw material - an opportunity. That single design decision is what makes the fertilizer possible.
In late 2024 the company launched WeeBloom, its first commercially available urine-derived fertilizer. It is a specialty struvite product - a nutrient label of 5-26-0.1 plus 10% magnesium - rich in the phosphorus that plants use to grow roots and flowers. It is registered as a fertilizer in Vermont and Massachusetts, which is a bureaucratic sentence that hides a genuinely hard achievement: convincing a state agriculture department that liquid gold belongs on the shelf.
Phosphorus is not a small subject. It is a finite, mined resource, and when it runs off into water it feeds the algae blooms that choke lakes - including Vermont's own Lake Champlain. Recovering phosphorus from waste instead of letting it pollute is one of those rare moves that helps at both ends of the pipe. Wasted* has leaned into the poetry of the closed loop: local farms test and use the recovered fertilizer, and the soccer club Vermont Green FC literally fertilized its pitch with WeeBloom - waste from the stands, quite plausibly, feeding the grass under the players' feet.
Reduce the harmful impacts of human waste by delivering dignified and sustainable sanitation to ecologically sensitive environments and the communities around them.- The founding mission, carried over from Do Good Sh*t
The model is quietly clever. On one side, sanitation-as-a-service: rent the units to job sites and events, the same recurring revenue any porta-potty company earns. On the other, the fertilizer: a second product squeezed out of what a normal operator would pay to dispose of. Serve enough venues - Wasted* counted more than 80 across Vermont before it looked south - and the waste stream becomes a supply chain. It raised $7.7 million in seed funding from climate-minded investors including Collaborative Fund and Susquehanna Investments, with backing from Gratitude Railroad and the Tuck Social Venture Fund along the way. In 2024, Forbes put CEO Taylor Zehren on its 30 Under 30 list for Social Impact - a first, perhaps, for a founder whose product spends its working life in a plastic booth.
The expansion map tells the rest of the story. Boston came first, in February 2024, the company's initial market outside its home state. Connecticut followed in March 2026, and Rhode Island routes launched the same month. What travels is not just trucks and toilets but a premise: that sanitation can be a service and a supply chain at once, and that the nutrients we flush are too valuable to bury.
None of this requires anyone to fall in love with the subject matter. It only requires them to notice that the old way - water, chemicals, a truck, a treatment plant, a lake full of algae - was never actually free. Wasted* just did the math out loud, painted a star on it, and put a dog in charge of morale.
Circular sanitation is not a metaphor here. It is the product roadmap.
Waterless urine-diversion dry toilets with solar-powered ventilation. No water, electricity, sewer, or chemicals - and no familiar summer smell.
A commercially registered urine-derived struvite fertilizer (5-26-0.1 + 10% Mg), rich in phosphorus and magnesium. Registered in Vermont and Massachusetts.
A first-of-its-kind standalone, waterless sanitation unit for parks, farms, and trailheads where no sewer or plumbing exists.
A premium waterless restroom trailer for events and venues that want the upgrade without the tank.
Seed round · $7.7M · 2023
Also on the roster: Trona, Chief Pup Officer, and Remi, Assistant Pup Manager.
Come back to that Saturday field. The crowd is gone, the band has packed up, and the star-painted booth stands alone in the churned-up grass. To everyone who used it, it was just a toilet that happened not to reek. But the day's contribution is already on the road to a Vermont lab, where the phosphorus that might have run into a lake will instead be pressed into a bag of WeeBloom and handed to a farmer down the valley. The circle that the old porta-potty broke - take, use, dump, pollute - has quietly been closed.
That is the trick Wasted* pulled off: not a slogan about sustainability, but a booth in a field doing the boring, essential work of turning an ending into a beginning. The waste is the product. The joke is real. And somewhere, a dog is getting the credit.