From Waste to Water: A Framework for Sustainable Freshwater Supply in Northeastern Illinois
Executive Summary
The present moment entails a new set of challenges to water management: A formidable challenge to water management is the growing imbalance between flooding and water scarcity.
- Flooding and scarcity can wildly alternate in the same place or transpire in proximity to each other.
- This uneven water geography harms aquatic ecosystems and disrupts human health, economic stability, and social balance. Current patterns of intensive water use and future anticipated demands, combined with the impacts of climate change, promise to further upend procurement of water.
- Developing adaptive infrastructure is the key to meeting these challenges.
- Water recycling that maximizes available water supply and supports commercial endeavors in situations of scarcity represents an essential piece of such adaptive infrastructure.
Because water recycling requires technical innovation and public health inquiry, as well as policy and urban planning considerations, we convened an interdisciplinary team to establish the research and development groundwork for water recycling. This report:
- Addresses technical issues around treatment and delivery of recycled water as well as its public health and environmental implications.
- Provides a cost-benefit analysis that serves to overcome political and economic barriers to adoption.
- Suggests that large-scale water reuse can play a role in job creation and economic revitalization.
- Addresses scenarios and solutions for uneven water geography in northeastern Illinois, characterized by urban flooding along the Lake Michigan coast and impending collapse of the inland Cambrian-Ordovician aquifer.
Presently, these parallel problems are not addressed in tandem. Taking them together points to the ways in which water recycling can balance extremes of flooding and drought in our region and beyond.
Prepared in March 2023 for Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD) by the Great Cities Institute and the Freshwater Lab at the University of Illinois, Chicago.