Water Wheel Jan/Feb 2021: Wastewater Reuse

Abstract

Time to reverse ‘unthinkable’ waste of municipal water resources Crazed by thirst, the Ancient Mariner pondered the ocean of water that surrounded him and declared: “Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink. . .” More than two hundred years after Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s grey-bearded sailor lamented the irony of scarcity amid abundance, researchers from the United Nations University in Canada have calculated that 380 billion m3 of municipal wastewater is generated every year – a massive body of largely untapped organics and liquids that could be mined and recycled into freshwater, nutrients and energy. To put that volume into context, the researchers note that 380 billion m3 is roughly equivalent to the annual discharge from the Ganges River in India, five times the amount of water passing over Niagara Falls each year – or enough to fill Africa’s Lake Victoria in roughly seven years and Lake Geneva in Switzerland in less than three months. And the volume of this largely wasted resource keeps growing, with a projected rise of roughly 24% by 2030 and 51% by 2050.

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