Integrating Water Streams

This article discusses the concept and practice of Integrated Water Cycle Management, its growing relevance in the context of changing climate and customer values and also the irrelevance of the business model with which water utilities have been operating for long.

- Bhakti Devi

Water utilities have been toying with the idea of Integrated Water Cycle Management (IWCM) for over a decade. IWCM calls for integrating the objectives of providing water, wastewater and stormwater services rather than treating them as separate and mutually exclusive services. For example, by meeting some of the water demands, especially non-potable ones, by capturing and cleaning wastewater and stormwater to required water quality, and not looking upon them as waste flows to be simply drained and discharged to the waterways.

Some utilities have built recycled water schemes as a way to avoid nutrient discharge into the waterways and the associated hefty pollution charges. Some others consider IWCM approach as a response to drought but without doing much about it and finding it much easier to resort to water restrictions which lead to the killing of community green open spaces and parks as well as green yards of the households.

Development of water treatment technologies like membrane filtration, ultra-filtration and reverse osmosis that enable turning urban stormwater and wastewater streams into cleaner waters along with the interest of utilities in IWCM have fuelled a lot of policy research on the costs and benefits of IWCM. Researchers and academics have spent millions of dollars of grant funding to develop umpteen frameworks and research outputs to help us understand the concept and to articulate the social, environmental and other benefits and costs of IWCM. A recent outcome of these researches has been the launching of a website and a centre of excellence (https://waterpartnership.org.au/ Australian Water Recycling Centre of Excellence) dedicated to research on the subject of water recycling. Literature is littered with hundreds of research publications and case studies of water recycling at building scale to community scale.