The Water Reuse Roadmap gives the reader exactly what it promises: a guide for initiating, communicating, implementing, and maintaining a wastewater reuse project, while taking a broad array of aspects and actions into account.
The book intends to provide guidance in this complex process, helping set up a successful project with a good technical performance that will garner general acceptance from authorities, engineers, and, not least, the end users of the reclaimed water. The primary audience of this book is, therefore, water resource planners and managers serving municipalities, utilities, industries, and the commercial sector.
In the Water Reuse Roadmap, the starting point is defining the social, technical, and financial feasibility of water reuse options. All these aspects are given much attention in the book, which is based on the “one water” approach to resource management. This concept incorporates the idea that all sources of water and its byproducts have value, and should be managed in a sustainable, inclusive, integrated way. Thus, water supply, surface water, groundwater, stormwater, and wastewater are interconnected so that solutions for water resource problems always relate to multiple purposes and multiple benefits. This requires planning involving multiple stakeholders, while also taking regulations into account and possible risks through application of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points approach. Furthermore, the bottom line for water reuse projects is the method of cost recovery used to implement and sustain projects, and this is elaborated in a separate chapter.
Communication and outreach is probably the most critical factor of a reuse project. This is made clear in a dedicated chapter where all the do’s and don’ts of communication and outreach are highlighted: research on public opinion and interviews, using the right terminology, finding alliances and partnerships, youth outreach, facility tours and water tasting, and many more actions that can be used as building stones for acceptance of a project. With this information, the communication element of the project should be under control.
Technological implementation also is covered in the book, emphasizing that this is just one of many aspects of a reuse project, but it remains an important one. The authors make a distinction between nonpotable and potable reuse with logically more attention given to the latter, in terms of technologies discussed. Membrane-based technologies appear as the current standard, but nonmembrane approaches, such as activated carbon and oxidation processes (ozone or advanced oxidation processes), are explored as well. These technologies can be combined with soil aquifer treatment. A separate “technical” chapter is devoted to monitoring, another crucial aspect of reuse projects.
In the final chapter, the attention again turns to maintenance with an emphasis on informing the public about the progress and monitoring of the reuse project. This is a clear message to conclude this stimulating and useful book. This book is a must-have for everyone involved in a water reuse project, not just managers.
This review appeared in the August 2018 issue of Water Environment and Technology.
Bart Van der Bruggen is a professor at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in the Department of Chemical Engineering.
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