Wastewater Treatment and Reuse

Wastewater treatment and reuse examines how municipal and industrial effluents can be cleaned, recovered, and redirected back into productive use — whether for agriculture, industry, or urban water systems — rather than discarded after a single pass. As freshwater scarcity intensifies across many regions, engineering approaches like decentralized treatment facilities and resource recovery systems offer pathways to close the water cycle while simultaneously extracting value from nutrients and energy embedded in waste streams. Researchers are actively working through how to assess the full environmental cost of these systems using life cycle analysis, and how reused water affects soil health, crop quality, and public health over the long term. A persistent open question is how to design governance and infrastructure frameworks that make reuse viable at scale in water-stressed cities without shifting contamination risks onto ecosystems or vulnerable communities.

Works

45,283

Total citations

392,599

Keywords

Wastewater ReuseWater ScarcitySustainability AssessmentDecentralized TreatmentResource RecoveryLife Cycle Assessment