during the summer, sanitation start-up finizio has been sending the toilets from festival to festival explains the empty hall at the company's office in eberswalde, near berlin, leaving ceo florian augustin with time to tinker. florian: the raw materials we're talking about are urine, and of course feces that's collected here. just enormous amounts of nutrients. it's good stuff that comes out of us. but we just flush it away and don't want to have anything to do with it. but it's something we really have to start dealing with again. reporter: that's exactly the goal of the state-sponsored research project zirkulierbar, which finizio is also a part of. ariane krause coordinates the project to gather human waste from public toilets, and turn it into a useable resource. instead of flushing the waste with water, it's covered with pulverized straw. florian: i can do a demonstration, as if someone were peeing. reporter: inside the toilet, the urine runs into a separate container. that means the feces stays dry. keeping them separate makes them easier to purify. ariane: the point of the proj