Department Environmental Social Sciences

Which Factors Determine Water Recycling Rates? A Qualitative Comparative Analysis in an Australian Context.

 

Water scarcity, climate change and increased demand have placed significant pressure on freshwater resources across the globe.  Provided that appropriate levels of water treatment are implemented, the technical community considers the reclamation of municipal wastewater as an integral part of responsible water resources management.  However recycling rates vary considerably across contexts.  A complex web of economic, social, political and technical issues have been identified as important in promoting recycling within individual case studies, however little research has considered which factors are significant across contexts.  The goal of this work is to conduct a meta-analysis of a wide set of cases towards the following overarching research goal:  What factors determine water recycling rates?  Australia will be used as a study context, and the research method will employ Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA).  Outcomes will provide practical, valuable lessons for pursuing water recycling efforts in other contexts.  Academic contributions will include: (1) test the utility of QCA for understanding behaviour in coupled human-water systems; and (2) contribute to emerging literature on coupled human-engineered systems by studying the factors that constrain the implementation of desirable engineering solutions.

Results

Generally, while economic factors are crucial for heavy use, factors relating to water stress and geographical proximity matter most for agricultural reuse. These results suggest that policies to promote wastewater reuse may be most effective if they target uses that are most feasible for utilities and correspond to the local context. This work also makes a methodological contribution through illustrating the potential utility of fsQCA for understanding the complex drivers of performance in water recycling.

Project team

Dr. Manuel Fischer Head of Department ESS & Group leader PEGO Tel. +41 58 765 5676 Send Mail
Prof. Dr. Karin Ingold Group leader, Cluster: PEGO Tel. +41 58 765 5676 Send Mail

Nadja Kunz

Publications

Drivers for and against municipal wastewater recycling: a review

The reclamation, treatment and reuse of municipal wastewater can provide important environmental benefits. In this paper, 25 studies on this topic were reviewed and it was found that there are many (>150) different drivers acting for and against wastewater recycling. To deal with the challenge of comparing studies which entailed different research designs, a framework was developed which allowed the literature to be organized into comparable study contexts. Studies were categorized according to the level of analysis (wastewater recycling scheme, city, water utility, state, country, global) and outcome investigated (development/investment in new schemes, program implementation, percentage of wastewater recycled, percentage of water demand covered by recycled water, multiple outcomes). Findings across comparable case studies were then grouped according to the type (for or against recycling) and category of driver (social, natural, technical, economic, policy or business). The utility of the framework is demonstrated by summarizing the findings from four Australian studies at the city level. The framework offers a unique approach for disentangling the broad range of potential drivers for and against water recycling and to focus on those that seem relevant in specific study contexts. It may offer a valuable starting point for building hypotheses in future work.
Kunz, N. C.; Fischer, M.; Ingold, K.; Hering, J. G. (2016) Drivers for and against municipal wastewater recycling: a review, Water Science and Technology, 73(2), 251-259, doi:10.2166/wst.2015.496, Institutional Repository