How can a smart water solution stimulate water reuse?

80-100 gallons of water per day is the daily water consumption of the average person without taking into account their water footprint1. All and all, water is valuable and found everywhere in our economy. Humanity needs water for its everyday needs. Having said this, the world’s water resources are shrinking and the world’s population is growing. This forces the water industry to start looking into different ways on how to treat water. In order to sustainably deal with water, many countries are looking into the option of reusing and recycling water. However, recycling water is a complicated and expensive process, and therefore needs to be looked at efficiently and effectively while ensuring water quality standards.

China, Mexico, and the United States (US) are the countries with the largest quantity of wastewater reuse, but in the first two cases, non-treated wastewater is taken into account. When looking at the reuse per inhabitant Qatar, Israel and Kuwait are the leading countries. The US started adopting potable water reuse systems in 1962. The States California, Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Arizona, and Colorado are operating systems that use highly treated water to enlarge municipal supplies. Specifically, Orange County, California already produces 70 million GPD of potable water that is either injected into water-supply aquifers or permitted to percolate into the region’s groundwater supplies via infiltration pond2. Not only the States within the US understand the importance of this reuse, cities like El Paso, are also looking and committing to the reuse of water to provide drinking water for its citizens3.

When considering water reuse for potable water, it is of importance that wastewater is properly monitored before entering the WWTP to prevent damage to the WWTP or catastrophic pollution events. Even though there is a positive shift within the water industry, the industry is still dealing with aging infrastructure and it is often the cause of severe pollution of drinking water (think of the Flint drinking water disaster). The aging infrastructure causes health risks and can damage the WWTP process, which leads to higher maintenance costs. High maintenance cost is one of the main reasons for wastewater infrastructure not being maintained properly, and create a continuous circle4. These challenges make it difficult to enable water-reuse projects and leave us with the question ‘How does the water industry properly manage and maintain its infrastructure to enable proper water-reuse without the increasing the costs?’

Smart water systems, digital platforms twinfrastructures, digitized water system are different names for smart water tools that can be a solution to these challenges. Even though different terminology is used, it  says the same; the wastewater sector needs to adopt a digital perspective to its network. Such a system can help the management generating real-time insights of the network, analyzing its behavior, identifying risk factors and can ensure that the water quality of the reused water is met. A holistic online system that provides you with this type of real-time data, offers water insights and enforcement suggestions is provided by Kando. Kando provides a 360 real-time view of the wastewater collection system. Kando’s holistic approach includes a methodology of combining hardware and software that identifies and predicts the behavior of the behavior of the network and reacts instantly when changes or possible threats occur.

Interested in learning more about how to adopt such a model for enhancing water reuse performance?

Visit Kando’s website or reach out to the US representative Anne-li Steutel-Maron, anne-li@kando.co.il, for more detailed information.

This article is also published on Medium.