Social, Economic, Environmental, and Technical Factors Influencing Water Reuse

A growing population together with rising per capita income has resulted in increased demand for water for virtually all uses. At the same time there has been increased public concern for maintaining the quality of streams for recreation, sight-seeing, and other social uses, and to conserve environmental values. A partial answer to these conflicts in water use and management is more extensive waste water reclamation and reuse. Heretofore, water salvage and reuse has been mainly practiced in specific operational cases, such as recycling industrial process water, or on an ad hoc basis, such as a series of diversions and subsequent discharges of waste water along reaches of a stream. However, in areas experiencing growing demand for water for virtually all social, economic, and environmental uses, an integrated region-wide approach to water reuse may be necessary in order to insure adequate supplies. This requires a more explicit understanding of the systems relations among social and economic water using activities and the environmental and technological aspects of waste water disposal in order to evaluate the opportunities for as well as the constraints on water salvage and reuse