Water is the most vital substance needed for all human beings — or every vivid existence of lives. It’s everywhere in our lives, and its cleanliness matters.
Water has evolved in parallel to humans throughout the past billion years and has long since brought the energy to revolutionize society. Water is omnipresent in every activity we do daily, and as such, it has forever been our responsibility to take good care of it. Although water circularity happens naturally in the form of the hydrologic cycle on our planet Earth, it is too slow for us to cover the need of the growing population and technologies.
The full circularity of water by definition is defined as “without the need to discharge any water back into our environment and letting the water flow inside an organization or our society”, and although impossible to execute at times, we are now one step closer to achieving this when people start to take awareness of the importance of water. You probably may not want to know, but water drought is a nightmare for all the living creatures of this world.
Fortunately, efforts in water reuse and recycling are led by water researchers who have effectively used methodologies to help construct an almost-completed circular water roadmap. Nevertheless, circularity is not the objective, but a means to an end. We need to consider circularity as part of the entire running machine and implement solutions accordingly [1].
Let’s look at a current wastewater treatment method implemented in the King County wastewater department in the city of Seattle [2]. As you can visualize, water runs through multiple treatment methods and finally becomes clear towards the end of the cycle. However, although we can see cleaner water, we often time ignore the byproducts, materials used, and energy input that make this possible. These are the things we need to pursue to truly create a circular system at least for treating water.
It is very hard to comprehensively know what the future will be, but we all know how important it is to envision and imagine what it could be. That’s where we continuously put effort into our society and make changes. To bring circularity into our lives, my conclusion is to always think out of the box and integrate the elements we can think of into the circularity picture.
It’s now the middle of 2022 and we have to plan wisely to fulfill our goal, especially these types of infrastructure which need to be planned and built within the next 10 years and implemented for another 30 to 50 years. This is the time we have to think about our future, this is not only for us but for our future generations.
[1] Meaning of circularity for the water sector. 01 November 2021
