Water Reuse

Objective of sustainable development of urban water systems: Satisfy water demands at a cost that is affordable to the society with the minimum environmental and social impacts. Reuse of treated waste-water for beneficial purposes offers a potential new water supply resource that can replace existing fresh water supply at times. Water reuse also reduces the rigorous and costly treatment requirements for effluent discharge to surface waters

Water Reuse: 

There may be technical barriers and/or health risks associated with water reuse.

Freshwater enters system from the surface (ground water sources) to municipal water treatment plans. Follows steps: water distribution, water use, wastewater discharge, wastewater treatment and then return for reuse. Whether or not water can be reused depends on the water quality levels. Criteria includes: pathogen and chemical constituents. Pathogen – associated with non-potable reuse of reclaimed municipal water because of risk of transmission of infectious disease. Chemical constituents – might affect acceptability of water for agriculture, direct potable reuse and some industrial applications

The World on Water Reuse:

The world is facing water shortage problems and water reuse is highly practiced, but that problem is nonexistent in Canada because there is plenty of water here and therefore, water reuse is not practiced on a big scale. Used for agricultural cropland irrigation, gold course and landscape irrigation, experimental housing, and reuse of wastewater at isolated facilities such as resorts, truck stops, etc..

In the Regional Municipality of Waterloo (RMW), there is the Grand River watershed. This integrated urban system supplies water to approximately 425,000 people (region). System consists of a complex network of 67 wells, reservoirs, pumping stations and trunk water maintenance. Average of 171.5 million liters of water supplied per day. Water comes from 2 sources: 75% from ground and 25% from surface water.

In the region, there are 11 waste-water treatment plants.

Chart shows amount of indoor and outdoor residential water use in the City of Waterloo which is located in the center of the region with a 2003 population of 103000. Reused water can be used for many of the sections in the chart.

"UWSpace: A Study on Urban Water Reuse Management Modeling." Handle Proxy. http://hdl.handle.net/10012/795 (accessed November 9, 2010).

Maya Levinshtein

Nov. 9, 2010