Responsible Potable Water Reuse

Abstract

As global water scarcity intensifies, potable water reuse, the process of treating wastewater to a quality suitable for drinking water, offers a path toward sustainable water management. However, despite its growing technical viability, wide-spread adoption has been hampered by public opposition, often reductively dis-missed as lacking ‘social acceptance’. Potable water reuse blurs the long-established societal and infrastructural separation between wastewater and drinking water, leading to concerns about safety, system reliability, trust in authorities, and disgust (the ‘yuck factor’). This dissertation argues that although addressing social acceptance is critical, current approaches remain largely insufficient and overlook vital social and ethical concerns. For instance, the dominant paradigm of spreading information to combat a lack of knowledge must give way to approaches that better address all relevant public concerns. Moreover, by shifting the lens to incorporate ethical acceptability, this work uncovers critical but neglected issues, including the potential marginalisation of nonvocal publics, the risk that potable water reuse entrenches technological lock-in through unsustainable infrastructure, and unresolved challenges in managing concentrated waste streams. Ultimately, this work highlights that social acceptance and ethical acceptability must be treated in tandem to ensure the desirable and responsible development of a technological system – a strategy for which this dissertation lays the groundwork.