From the PI 

“Continued urban growth and limited water resources can significantly impact the long-term viability of urban centers located in arid and semi-arid regions. A long-term, sustainable urban water supply is a Grand Challenge currently faced by our Built Environment. In particular, the utilization of local water resources is typically not sustainable and reliance on external water sources faces long-term uncertainty, such as climate change and population growth. While the concept of waste and stormwater as a resource has gained traction, more needs to be done to ensure sustainable water resources. Thus, there is a critical need for re-imagining the way we design and retrofit our urban water systems to more efficiently utilize our limited water resources. Without a significant re-design of our urban water infrastructure to increase water-use efficiency, urban centers within the Southwest are at increased risk for water shortages due to population growth and extreme events such as droughts.

Our long-term objective is to develop an integrated planning and management framework that will move urban centers towards a sustainable net-zero urban water (NZUW) paradigm. The objective of this project is to assess the fraction of our potable water systems that could be replaced by alternative water sources such as reclaimed or grey water. Our central hypothesis is that the use of decentralized gray and/or reclaimed water can increase overall water resource efficiency – by recycling water within the urban environment – thereby reducing our reliance on external water supplies and improving overall system resilience. Our rationale for understanding the distribution of current water consumption is to provide the foundation to evaluate the trade-offs associated with how to design new, or retrofit existing, urban water infrastructure to increase water-use efficiency and maintaining adequate water quantity and quality for the end-users.”