"Your Duty as a Water Professional is to educate someone who doesn't understand Water Reuse!" - Austin Alexander - Xylem

(don't) Waste Water! | Water Tech to Solve the World

If you're a regular listener of this podcast, I hope I don't need to convince you about the perks of water reuse: it's a widely untapped water resource in an era of growing water scarcity, it's the cheapest of all the unconventional water sources, notably much cheaper than seawater desalination, and it comes with a wealth of welcome side-effects, ranging from much better environmental impact and removal of trace compounds and endocrine disruptors, all the way through resource recovery and circular economy.

Great, that's a very rational story, yet we humans are no rational beings despite what we believe. We're emotional, and the emotions associated with water reuse are, let's face it, tainted. As a result, despite all the good reasons to adopt it, the recent growth we've seen in water reuse's contribution to our water mix might be an optical illusion. It's growing, yes, but a bit like a dragster to which you would have attached a parachute after having placed an elephant in the passenger seat.

So the question becomes: how do we remove that elephant and that parachute? How do we speed up the much-needed adoption of water reuse? And what prevents the elephant from disembarking the car?

To answer these, we'll delve with Austin today into the challenge of fostering the political will and public acceptance necessary for reuse's widespread adoption. We'll follow up on Friday with another brilliant return guest, Aaron Tartakovsky from Epic Cleantec, to look into infrastructure challenges, outdated regulations, and, again, overcoming public perception. And I'll close that tryptic with my own synthesis, leveraging some of my former guest's wisdom - notably David Lloyd Owen and Paul Gagliardo - but also Austin, Aaron, and Henry Charrabé, which you've not heard on that microphone yet, that should be out next Monday and available on my main YouTube channel as well.

Full Episode: https://dww.show/beyond-technology-the-social-dynamics-of-water-reuse/

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