Achilli Discusses Wastewater Recycling for Arizona's Growing Population

Arizona's population has steadily increased over the past century, but the amount of water present in the state is roughly the same. With constantly more people demanding water, governments and scientists are looking to new and novels ways to provide resources to a booming population. CHEE associate professor Andrea Achilli recently appeared on Arizona Public Media's Arizona Science podcast to discuss how small-scale wastewater recycling may hold the key to satiating the arid state's growing water demands.

Achilli explained how he is working to "close the loop" on domestic wastewater in order to create clean drinking water. 

"I believe to enable water reuse on the city level, we really need to change our paradigm for a centralized system to a decentralized system in which each large building, neighborhood, even houses, will have their own recycling and reuse system," Achilli said. "Moving water back-and-forth is very expensive... We need to make the reuse of water on-site."