CAREER: An Integrated Research and Education Plan to Navigate Tradeoffs in the Design of Sustainable and Resilient Water Reuse Systems

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This project will address a critical barrier to reliable access to safe water: the lack of widespread adoption of water reuse strategies. This barrier stems from an inability to upgrade, re-design, or integrate wastewater and drinking water treatment approaches without compromising public health or incurring unacceptably high financial or environmental costs. The research plan will generate a foundation of data, understanding, tools, and processes to advance widespread adoption of sustainable and resilient water reuse strategies. It will create a comprehensive assessment framework that integrates sustainability and resilience principles to help identify hidden barriers and important tradeoffs. It allows for the integration of wastewater and drinking water process models by establishing an expanded set of variables through experimentation and modeling. It characterizes the safe operating space of existing and novel water reuse technologies as well as demarcates a decision space that accounts for the stakeholder data that will be collected to improve understanding of diverse perspectives. Finally, the project will develop effective new teaching approaches via a rigorous multi-year, iterative effort to improve decision- making skill sets and retention.The research plan starts by building an understanding of the scope of reuse options by evaluating the performance of a portfolio of technologies to (1) elucidate the safe operating spaces of existing and novel water reuse technologies across a landscape of possible designs and operational conditions. Next, it expands beyond technology performance to (2) establish a comprehensive, quantitative assessment framework and integrates it with reuse process modelling and stakeholder perspectives in an adaptable decision-support model. Finally, it takes advantage of the integrated decision-support model by conducting a scenario analysis to (3) identify salient features and characteristics of sustainable water reuse applications, and seeks to leverage this insight to elucidate drivers, barriers, and levers of change. The applicability and adoption of the proposed research efforts will be enhanced by improved stakeholder engagement and engineering student training. The research objectives are combined with integral education and outreach objectives to: (1) improve communication and understanding of diverse perspectives, and (2) foster an ability to navigate uncertainty and tradeoffs. Outreach efforts include soliciting and incorporating input through a series of workshops, case studies, and online surveys from a diverse range of stakeholders (public consumers, industrial consumers, engineers, researchers, regulators, and utilities). Education efforts include evaluating different approaches to improve understanding of uncertainty and tradeoffs, in multiple contexts, by developing and assessing the effectiveness of undergraduate environmental engineering teaching modules and by developing a “wicked problems” card game.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.