Project leads: Carolyn Hayek, Researcher and Teaching Fellow, Columbia University, and Miriam Hacker, Research Program Manager, Water Research Foundation.

Data scientist: Curtis Atkisson, eScience Institute, University of Washington.

DSSG fellows: Daniel Vogler, Jihyeon Bae, Mbye Sallah, Nora Povejsil.

Click here for participant bios.

Communities around the United States are thinking of alternative water systems to address local water challenges. One example of this is water reuse, which is defined by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as “the practice of reclaiming water from a variety of sources, treating it, and reusing it for beneficial purposes.” The current social problem is that communities only see water reuse as an opportunity for areas that are experiencing water scarcity, rather than realizing it’s full potential to address a wide range of water challenges, like reducing combined sewer overflows, minimizing the nutrients that are discharged to the environment, and lowering flood risk. 

Our project aims to address this social problem by developing a framework for quantifying a community’s potential for water reuse based on various motivators—or drivers—to identify whether water reuse could be a local solution that merits further investigation. Combining that data into an informative index and presenting the results in a clear and digestible format is critical for supporting local decision-making. Using publicly available data across the US, our project looks at the correlation between drivers (both presence and intensity) and characterizes the benefits communities might find by exploring water reuse. Outcomes from this work will be synthesizing these relationships into an interactive storymap for effective, real-world use of the research by local communities, engineers, and decision-makers.

Learn more on the project website. Watch the presentation here, or the full recording of all 2024 team presentations here.