Dataset Information

Hydroeconomic modeling of resource recovery from wastewater: Implications for water quality and quantity management.

ABSTRACT: Emerging technologies and practices allow wastewater treatment facilities to recover valuable resources such as nutrients, energy, and recycled water during the wastewater treatment process. The ability to recover resources from wastewater introduces new tradeoffs in both water quality and quantity management. In particular, the fact that communities can obtain revenue from the sale of resources that are recovered from wastewater may help internalize the externalities of insufficient wastewater treatment. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model to characterize these tradeoffs within a hydroeconomic framework of optimal wastewater treatment with resource recovery, which is particularly well suited for applications in nutrient management. We use this model to derive analytical results that describe the economically optimal level of deployment, accounting for the fact that the technology or practice is costly and it generates benefits in the form of revenue from the recovered resource, as well as other societal benefits, such as improvements in human and ecosystem health. In addition, we present two examples using specific functional forms for treatment costs to demonstrate how the model can be applied to obtain general principles regarding societally optimal deployment. Our hydroeconomic framework can be used to explore the socioeconomic implications of strategies that target deployment of wastewater treatment with resource recovery, especially nutrients, at multiple scales.

SUBMITTER: Kuwayama Y

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7317512 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Hydroeconomic modeling of resource recovery from wastewater: Implications for water quality and quantity management.

Kuwayama Yusuke Y Olmstead Sheila M SM

Journal of environmental quality 20200318 3

Emerging technologies and practices allow wastewater treatment facilities to recover valuable resources such as nutrients, energy, and recycled water during the wastewater treatment process. The ability to recover resources from wastewater introduces new tradeoffs in both water quality and quantity management. In particular, the fact that communities can obtain revenue from the sale of resources that are recovered from wastewater may help internalize the externalities of insufficient wastewater ...[more]

PMID: 33016395

Similar Datasets

Project description:Untreated and minimally treated wastewater discharged into the environment have the potential to adversely affect groundwater dependent ecosystems and nearshore marine health. Addressing this issue requires a systems approach that links land use and wastewater management decisions to potential impacts on the nearshore marine environment via changes in water quality and quantity. To that end, a framework was developed to assess decisions that have cascading effects across multiple elements of the ridge-to-reef system. In an application to Kona (Hawai'i, USA), eight land use and wastewater management scenarios were evaluated in terms of wastewater system upgrade costs and wastewater related nutrient loads in groundwater, which eventually discharge to nearshore waters, resulting in potential impacts to marine habitat quality. Without any upgrades of cesspools or the existing wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), discharges of nutrients are expected to increase substantially with permitted development, with potential detrimental impacts to the marine environment. Results suggest that converting all of the existing cesspools to aerobic treatment units (ATU) and upgrading the existing WWTP to R-1 quality provide the highest protection to nearshore marine habitat at a cost of $569 million in present value terms. Other wastewater management options were less effective but also less costly. For example, targeted cesspool conversion (a combination of septic and ATU installation) in conjunction with the WWTP upgrade still provided a substantial reduction in nutrients and potential impacts to marine habitat quality relative to the present situation at a price point roughly $100 million less than the entirely ATU option. Of note, results were more sensitive to the inclusion of the WWTP upgrade option than they were to assumptions regarding the efficiency of the cesspool conversion technologies. The model outputs also suggest that the spatial distribution of potential impacts should be carefully considered when comparing different wastewater management scenarios. When evaluated separately, the WWTP option reduced total nutrients by more than the targeted cesspool conversion option at a fraction of the cost. However, potential improvements in marine habitat quality only occurred in the immediate vicinity of the WWTP, whereas the benefits under targeted cesspool conversion were more evenly distributed along the coast.

Project description:BackgroundThe dominant paradigm for modeling the complexities of interacting populations and food webs is a system of coupled ordinary differential equations in which the state of each species, population, or functional trophic group is represented by an aggregated numbers-density or biomass-density variable. Here, using the metaphysiological approach to model consumer-resource interactions, we formulate a two-state paradigm that represents each population or group in a food web in terms of both its quantity and quality.Methodology and principal findingsThe formulation includes an allocation function controlling the relative proportion of extracted resources to increasing quantity versus elevating quality. Since lower quality individuals senescence more rapidly than higher quality individuals, an optimal allocation proportion exists and we derive an expression for how this proportion depends on population parameters that determine the senescence rate, the per-capita mortality rate, and the effects of these rates on the dynamics of the quality variable. We demonstrate that oscillations do not arise in our model from quantity-quality interactions alone, but require consumer-resource interactions across trophic levels that can be stabilized through judicious resource allocation strategies. Analysis and simulations provide compelling arguments for the necessity of populations to evolve quality-related dynamics in the form of maternal effects, storage or other appropriate structures. They also indicate that resource allocation switching between investments in abundance versus quality provide a powerful mechanism for promoting the stability of consumer-resource interactions in seasonally forcing environments.Conclusions/significanceOur simulations show that physiological inefficiencies associated with this switching can be favored by selection due to the diminished exposure of inefficient consumers to strong oscillations associated with the well-known paradox of enrichment. Also our results demonstrate how allocation switching can explain observed growth patterns in experimental microbial cultures and discuss how our formulation can address questions that cannot be answered using the quantity-only paradigms that currently predominate.

Project description:Herbivores consider the variation of forage qualities (nutritional content and digestibility) as well as quantities (biomass) when foraging. Such selection patterns may change based on the scale of foraging, particularly in the case of ungulates that forage at many scales.To test selection for quality and quantity in free-ranging herbivores across scales, however, we must first develop landscape-wide quantitative estimates of both forage quantity and quality. Stoichiometric distribution models (StDMs) bring opportunity to address this because they predict the elemental measures and stoichiometry of resources at landscape extents.Here, we use StDMs to predict elemental measures of understory white birch quality (% nitrogen) and quantity (g carbon/m2) across two boreal landscapes. We analyzed global positioning system (GPS) collared moose (n = 14) selection for forage quantity and quality at the landscape, home range, and patch extents using both individual and pooled resource selection analyses. We predicted that as the scale of resource selection decreased from the landscape to the patch, selection for white birch quantity would decrease and selection for quality would increase.Counter to our prediction, pooled-models showed selection for our estimates of quantity and quality to be neutral with low explanatory power and no scalar trends. At the individual-level, however, we found evidence for quality and quantity trade-offs, most notably at the home-range scale where resource selection models explain the largest amount of variation in selection. Furthermore, individuals did not follow the same trade-off tactic, with some preferring forage quantity over quality and vice versa.Such individual trade-offs show that moose may be flexible in attaining a limiting nutrient. Our findings suggest that herbivores may respond to forage elemental compositions and quantities, giving tools like StDMs merit toward animal ecology applications. The integration of StDMs and animal movement data represents a promising avenue for progress in the field of zoogeochemistry.

Dataset Information

Hydroeconomic modeling of resource recovery from wastewater: Implications for water quality and quantity management.

Publications

Hydroeconomic modeling of resource recovery from wastewater: Implications for water quality and quantity management.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets