Environmental and Water Studies- Making Water Sustainable

What makes water sustainable? Part of the answer is availability: there must be enough freshwater of the right quality to meet local demands. But that is not enough. The source of water must also be financially sustainable. One way to address this issue is to take advantage of the revenue value of wastewater â€" as a local source of freshwater, but also as a source of renewable energy, nutrients, materials, and even valuable information on community health. Emerging technologies could enable this recovery of these resources, but testing is needed at a believable scale and over a believable period of time. For wastewater treatment, this means treating hundreds of tons of wastewater per day over a period of months. Academia is poorly equipped for such testing, and while wastewater utilities are equipped to do this, they are unlikely to do so if the technologies to be tested have the potential to be “disruptive”. Of greater interest to utilities are technologies that enable incremental improvements and can be implemented with minimum disruption and minimal cost. A strategy that could potentially address this issue is testing of promising technologies at pilot scale at wastewater treatment plants or at new testing facilities on campuses. For this to be possible, however, both academia (faculty, students) and practitioners (consultants, utility operators) will need to accept a level of risk and uncertainty that is higher than either group is currently accustomed to. Professor Criddle will try to persuade you that the benefits of such a collaboration are worth the risks, and could greatly improve water sustainability.

Speaker: Craig Criddle, Stanford