Water Reuse through Nexus Perspective: Assessing the Sustainability and Opportunities of Urban Systems under Public-Private Partnership

The growing dependency of the industrial sector on water in an increasingly water-stressed landscape has led industries to adopt strategies for water minimisation and water reuse. Such circular economy practices by industries have increased in the past years. Nevertheless, water reuse applications have often related to internal water reuse rather than the application of external treated wastewater in the industrial production chain. Promoting public-private partnership (PPP) for water reuse by increasing the understanding of factors hampering its large-scale implementation is key for increasing the acceptance of water reuse and knowledge transfer on it. This project adopts co-participatory approaches for the assessment of water reuse sustainability and the holistic understanding of PPP in urban water management via nexus thinking perspectives. The application of the Resource Nexus seeks to generate knowledge-oriented solution options for increased urban sustainability and to systematise circular economy business models to scale up water reuse in industrial settings. Specifically, this project will focus on the German context and it will define both barriers and drivers for water reuse uptake in water intensive sectors and the feasibility of the water reuse in industrial settings via public private partnership schemes. This project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany under the SMART-WaterDomain project.