WATER REUSE RESOURCES

  • Produced water is far from ordinary wastewater. It typically contains high concentrations of dissolved salts, residual hydrocarbons, suspended solids, heavy metals, chemical additives, and naturally occurring contaminants. Without proper treatment, managing these complex waste streams becomes both environmentally risky and financially burdensome.

  • Whether an area is urban or rural, large or small, its water and wastewater treatment utilities face pressures ranging from supply scarcity and increasing operational costs to more stringent regulatory guidelines. These pressures have combined in recent years to shift the conversation around potable water reuse from a potential option to an increasingly important water management strategy.

  • As communities and industries compete for finite water supplies, utilities are looking for strategies that support economic growth while reducing pressure on existing resources.
  • Data centers are evolving into industrial-scale thermal-management facilities as artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), cloud platforms, and accelerated computing increase rack power density. Modern AI racks can exceed 50–120 kW per rack, creating substantially higher heat-rejection requirements than conventional enterprise infrastructure. ASHRAE's (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) AI Data Center Energy Performance Framework identifies liquid cooling as an important architecture for these high-density environments.
  • Nearly 45–60% of a reverse osmosis (RO) plant's operating cost is linked to energy consumption, while membrane fouling can reduce productivity by 15–40% and increase cleaning costs by thousands of dollars annually. The newest generation of RO systems is therefore focused on reducing energy demand, extending membrane life, and using intelligent monitoring to predict fouling before performance declines.

  • Water scarcity in the U.S. is increasing almost as rapidly as demand for clean drinking water. In response, more municipalities and public utilities are actively pivoting toward water reuse strategies. Yet many of these projects are running up against an archaic administrative bottleneck.
  • For the better part of a decade, industrial electricity prices behaved like a slowly shifting floor. From 2016 through 2020, wholesale prices in most major markets were remarkably stable. A plant built in 2018 could reasonably expect its electricity costs to drift, not lurch, through the early 2020s. That baseline is gone.
  • In an industrial landscape increasingly shaped by lifecycle accountability, material traceability, and rising disposal costs, chromium recovery is not merely a technical alternative — it is a strategic upgrade, where wastewater can become a resource stream.
  • Transitioning to advanced purification methods like UV-hypochlorite oxidation allows municipalities to secure reliable, local water supplies. These strategies mitigate drought risks and protect coastal environments by transforming wastewater into a high-quality resource for reuse.

  • With the rise of water scarcity, environmental regulations, and corporate sustainability mandates, produced water treatment has become a strategic imperative for industries far beyond oil and gas. It is one of the fastest-growing segments in the water treatment industry, which has emerged as an amalgamation of environmental stewardship, regulatory compliance, and technological innovation.

WATER REUSE SOLUTIONS

  • DE NORA TETRA™ Modular Deepbed™ Filter Modular Packaged Filtration Plant

    The DE NORA TETRA™ Modular DeepBed Filter Plant from De Nora Water Technologies is designed as a competitive filtration plant for tertiary effluent from small to medium size sewage works. The Modular DeepBed Filter utilizes the technology of DeepBed filtration that has made the TETRA filter such a successful tertiary treatment process over many years in Europe and the United States.

  • NeoTech D238™

    The NeoTech D238™ is specially designed to disinfect water and is an essential component in advanced oxidation processes.

  • Waste Technologies Transform Problems To Profit

    Anaerobic digestion processes that radically improve the quality of wastewater while delivering green energy extracted from biological waste streams are emerging as a profitable way for agricultural and food processing industries cope with the twin impact of drought and pollution challenges.

  • Reducing And Reusing Water In Steel Manufacturing

    The art of manufacturing steel for industries is well over 100 years old. Within this time, the steel business has fulfilled consumer needs, including construction, transportation, and manufacturing. The steel manufacturing process is quite intensive as it requires a lot of water to cool down the application. Steel plants constantly look for strategies that can help sustain the steel for a longer time by efficiently improving water and energy consumption.

  • BioBarrier® Membrane BioReactor (MBR) & HSMBR

    Bio-Microbics introduces a new generation of wastewater treatment solutions, the BioBarrier® HSMBR® (High Strength Membrane Bioreactor), to help meet the increasingly stringent needs of specialized applications. The membranes and processes used in this advanced system act as an impenetrable physical barrier for nearly all common pollutants found in wastewater today. The advanced technology offers the highest quality effluent possible on the market.  The BioBarrier® MBR was the first system to be approved for water reuse (NSF/ANSI Std 350, class R) by the NSF (National Sanitation Foundation) International.

WATER REUSE VIDEOS

On this episode of The Water Online Show, hosts Travis Kennedy and Kevin Westerling interview Fred Gerringer, Brown and Caldwell’s Water Reuse National Practice Leader, about the creation of a first-of-its-kind State Water Reuse Regulatory Guide being developed for the WateReuse Association and its partner organizations.