A Research Agenda for the Future of Urban Water Management: Exploring the Potential of Nongrid, Small-Grid, and Hybrid Solutions.

Recent developments in high- and middle-income countries have exhibited a shift from conventional urban water systems to alternative solutions that are more diverse in source separation, decentralization, and modularization. These solutions include nongrid, small-grid, and hybrid systems to address such pressing global challenges as climate change, eutrophication, and rapid urbanization. They close loops, recover valuable resources, and adapt quickly to changing boundary conditions such as population size. Moving to such alternative solutions requires both technical and social innovations to coevolve over time into integrated socio-technical urban water systems. Current implementations of alternative systems in high- and middle-income countries are promising, but they also underline the need for research questions to be addressed from technical, social, and transformative perspectives. Future research should pursue a transdisciplinary research approach to generating evidence through socio-technical "lighthouse" projects that apply alternative urban water systems at scale. Such research should leverage experiences from these projects in diverse socio-economic contexts, identify their potentials and limitations from an integrated perspective, and share their successes and failures across the urban water sector.

Integration of microalgae systems at municipal wastewater treatment plants: implications for energy and emission balances.

Integrating microalgae systems (MAS) at municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) to produce of bioenergy offers many potential synergies. Improved energy balances provide a strong incentive for WWTPs to integrate MAS, but it is crucial that WWTPs maintain their barrier function to protect water resources. We perform a prospective analysis of energy and emission balances of a WWTP with integrated MAS, based on a substance flow analysis of the elements carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P). These elements are the main ingredients of wastewater, and the key nutrients for algae growth. We propose a process design which relies solely on resources from wastewater with no external input of water, fertilizer or CO(2). The whole process chain, from cultivation to production of bioelectricity, takes place at the WWTP. Our results show that MAS can considerably improve energy balances of WWTPs without any external resource input. With optimistic assumptions, they can turn WWTPs into net energy producers. While intensive C recycling in MAS considerably improves the energy balance, we show that it also impacts on effluent quality. We discuss the importance of nonharvested biomass for effluent quality and highlight harvesting efficiency as key factor for energy and emission balances of MAS at WWTP.