The Evolution Of Wastewater Reuse

The need to conserve our water resources has gone from idealistic to imperative in recent years. There are countless ways that utilities are looking to meet that pressure, but few solutions are making more headway than wastewater reuse.

Wastewater has commonly been reused for non-potable applications like crop irrigation and power plant cooling. Recently, advances in wastewater treatment have made indirect and direct potable reuse more popular and many are changing the way they think about the process.

To describe the evolved thinking around wastewater reuse during a Water Online Radio interview at ACE.15, Jim Lauria, the Vice President of Sales and Marketing with Mazzei Injector Company, found it easiest to segment the rationales into numerical stages.

“In the concept of wastewater, we've gone from 1.0 where we throw it away, put it in the river, lake, stream, ocean, wherever it goes,” says Lauria. “The 2.0: ‘Hey, you know, we really should clean it up before we throw it into the river, lake or stream,’ to 3.0 which is, ‘Hey, how can we reuse that water?’ Now, we are going to 4.0 where we actually think there's other things besides the water. We need the resource recovery of the water, the energy, the biosolids, and the nutrients.”

Mazzei, a manufacturing design company that provides components for high-efficiency injector systems, create the types of treatment technologies that make this future of reuse possible.

To hear more from Lauria about the state of wastewater reuse and about the solutions being offered by Mazzei, tune in below.