Using water and wastewater decentralization to enhance the resilience and sustainability of cities

Abstract

The imperative to make energy and resource consumption more sustainable is prompting a critical reconsideration of all human endeavours. Within urban water management, the drive to enhance sustainability is grounded in the recognition that water services consume a substantial amount of energy and that wastewater contains valuable resources, including water, heat, organic matter and essential plant nutrients. To make urban water systems more sustainable, a paradigm shift is needed. Among the proposed strategies, source separation coupled with anaerobic co-digestion appears to be an effective means of recovering energy, water and nutrients. Here, as existing centralized infrastructure that serves tens to hundreds of thousands of people is difficult to alter and the technologies needed to realize this strategy are difficult to implement in single-family homes, we consider the scale of a city block. Using a quantitative model of unit processes that simulate energy, water and nutrient flows, we consider the technical and economic feasibility of a representative decentralized system, as well as its environmental impacts. To realize potential synergies associated with on-site use of the recovered resources, we complement the decentralized water system with vertical farming, photovoltaic energy generation and rainwater harvesting. Our analysis suggests that decentralized water systems can serve as a cornerstone of efforts to enhance resource efficiency and improve the resilience of cities.