Wastewater Treatment and Reuse

Wastewater treatment and reuse examines how water that has passed through industrial, municipal, or agricultural systems can be cleaned, recovered, and returned to productive use rather than discharged as waste. As freshwater scarcity intensifies across urban and manufacturing regions, researchers are developing decentralized treatment systems that process wastewater closer to where it is generated, reducing infrastructure costs and enabling local resource recovery — extracting nutrients, energy, and reusable water from streams that were once considered purely problematic. A central challenge is rigorously evaluating whether reuse schemes deliver genuine environmental and public health benefits across their full life cycle, accounting for soil quality, crop safety, and long-term ecosystem effects that simple efficiency metrics miss. Active work is now focused on reconciling the technical promise of these approaches with the social and regulatory conditions that determine whether communities and industries will actually adopt them at scale.

Works

44,638

Total citations

387,871

Keywords

Wastewater ReuseWater ScarcitySustainability AssessmentDecentralized TreatmentResource RecoveryLife Cycle Assessment