Exploring ways to economically reclaim and reuse treated wastewater

Few of us have anything good to say about wastewater. Once we’ve flushed the toilet or rinsed our hair, the used water simply disappears, never to be thought of again.

But Craig Criddle has a different perspective. "Instead of thinking about wastewater in the negative sense all of the time, let’s think about what resources are in it that might be useful," says Criddle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.

Today, Criddle is leading an effort to find economical ways of recovering valuable products from wastewater. "There is value to be found in wastewater," he says. "Of course, it’s got a lot of bad stuff that we’ve got to get rid of, like pathogens and salt. But it also has biodegradable organics and nutrients – like nitrogen and phosphorus – that are potentially useful."

By Mark Shwartz

http://woods.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/focal.php?name=wastewater&focal_area=freshwater