Department Environmental Social Sciences

The WaterReuseLab project aims at analyzing whether and how a new generation of high-quality decentralized wastewater reuse systems could be developed in Bengaluru, India and scaled up to other cities in India and beyond. In close collaboration with local research partners and stakeholders, the project assesses technologies, water quality monitoring approaches, business models, user acceptance issues and governance models that taken together could help create water reuse solutions ‘that work’ in addressing booming megacitie’s complex water challenges.

Background

Providing a growing urban population with safe and affordable water is a key sustainability challenge of our time, especially in the booming megacities of low-and middle-income countries. Decentralized water treatment and reuse systems (DWTRS), which treat wastewater onsite and enable water reuse directly within buildings or in construction sites, laundries or public parks in the neighborhood offer a flexible and drought-resilient solution. However, few cities have successfully implemented DWTRS at scale, and research on how technological and social factors jointly influence the performance of this innovative water management approach is still scarce.

The WaterReuseLab project addresses this gap by exploring the development of DWTRS in Bengaluru, India—a case study exemplifying water and sanitation challenges in rapidly growing megacities. The project applies a socio-technical systems perspective for identifying success conditions for creating reliable, acceptable, affordable, and scalable DWTRS solutions. It will provide a holistic assessment of DWTRS development potentials and barriers and analyze how shifts in context conditions, incentives, and actor strategies impact the emergence of a new template for urban water management in Bengaluru. Additionally, the project will examine how local coalitions can navigate various development scenarios and how solutions developed in Bengaluru could diffuse into other Indian cities and beyond.

The project builds on intensive inter- and transdisciplinary exchanges among researchers from various Eawag departments, our local research and implementation partners, WELL Labs and CDD, as well as practice partners in Bangalore and Switzerland. Our research questions and outputs are defined and refeined through constant interactions with local partners and through a series of stakeholder workshops organized across the full duration of the project.