Water & Waste

RESEARCH OVERVIEW

In the United States, centralized water and wastewater systems are aging, energy-intensive, and fail to remove nutrients as well as emerging pollutants that compromise ecosystem health and limit the ability for downstream water reuse for drinking or irrigation.

To address scarcity, water and wastewater utilities are engaging in water conservation campaigns and tailoring wastewater treatment to suit multiple uses, e.g., providing reclaimed (non-potable) water for electric utilities & golf courses, resulting in distributed system design. In this way, water, wastewater, energy & agriculture sectors are increasingly intertwined. This requires developing a full understanding of linkages across households, utilities, and their larger watershed. It similarly requires a (re)assessment of the institutions that govern such linkages.

In developing world cities, where water & wastewater infrastructure is often severely lacking, distributed systems are necessarily the first step, with separation of grey and black water occurring in many neighborhoods. New low cost distributed treatment technologies capable of resource recovery and of being tailored to various treatment standards (depending on the intended end use of the treated water) are needed in both the United States and India. Integrating emerging technologies with behavioral change among water users, as well as cross-water-system linkages both physical and institutional, is essential to the sustainability and resilience of existing and emerging water and wastewater treatment systems.