Minnesota starts to think about re-using wastewater

To conserve water and save on costs, the L&T South City Apartment complex in Bengaluru retrofitted more than 1,600 apartments to swap freshwater for treated wastewater from a Sewage Treatment Plant for flushing toilets. In doing so, the complex has been able to reduce the number of freshwater tankers needed to support the buildings by about 10 percent.

Several pilot studies point to the viability of desalination projects being an effective option for farmers in certain fresh-water-scarce regions.

The Yellowstone Club ski resort in Montana is misting treated wastewater into the air with machines to make snow. This keeps its ski runs open during dry winters and produces more runoff in the summers to recharge crucial aquifers.

Through a combination of strict outdoor water use restrictions, water waste enforcement, recycling of indoor use water, and the installation of new pump technology, the Southern Nevada Water Authority was able to reduce water use by roughly 26 billion gallons over one year.

Water meters at homes that get their supply from the Weber Basin Water Conservancy are used to help reduce water consumption by informing residents how much water they are using.

Getting rid of urine is very wasteful, in the European Union alone almost 6,000 billion liters of water are used to flush urine. TOOPI Organics is using urine as a resource. Founded in 2019, the biotech company collects urine and using a fermentation process transforms it so it can be used as a fertilizer. Its urine fertilizer helped plants grow 60 to 110 percent more than a traditional mineral fertilizer. Its factory in the city of Bordeaux is able to produce 2,500 liters of organic fertilizer per day.

Indonesian villagers were experiencing water shortages as natural springs started to dry up in part due to climate change, so they installed infiltration wells to collect and absorb rainwater. Not everyone, at first, wanted to implement the wells on their property, but by 2020, there were 320 infiltration wells in Patemon village. This water conservation project is not being implemented throughout the rest of the country.

After realizing the difficulty that people in South Africa were facing when carrying water back to their communities, two South African engineers devised a machine "that brings all the water back in one trip by rolling it." Users report that while it does not perform well on steep terrain, it can carry much larger amounts of water "effortlessly and in a single trip." So far, 60,000 of these large plastic drums have been sold, but the cost of the machine is often a barrier for those who live below the poverty line.

Innovation is the key to resilience. In Branson, Colorado, the community of only 55 residents and with volunteer town council has taken on the massive task of bringing its water system up to compliance with the Colorado Department of Health. Because the state and federal government did not have the specific resources to assist Branson, the community turned to a locally developed, innovative water filtration system and an unorthodox funding campaign to pay for it.

As demand soars and climate change routinely throws cities into shortage crises, the availability of clean water is one of the most pressing challenges of the present and near future. Desalination has long been lambasted for being too expensive and polluting, but a new solar-powered prototype is putting forth a more sustainable, small-scale solution. Solar collectors boil water and then condense it separately from the brine and dirt so that it is drinkable.