Dive Brief:
- Facilities managers in water-intensive industries have a role to play in addressing systemic challenges to the country's water infrastructure, an Aspen institute policy paper says.
- The country faces over extraction, declining quality and uneven availability of safe and affordable water, the organization said in its National Water Strategy, released last month.
- “The full scope of our economic reliance on water is larger than we often realize,” the nonprofit group says. “This economic dimension deserves the same attention that has been given to water’s critical roles in public health, environmental protection, and quality of life. Not because it matters more, but because it has often been overlooked and has the potential to galvanize business leaders, investors, and economic decision-makers who have not previously seen themselves as part of the water security mission.”
Dive Insight:
The challenging state of the country’s water infrastructure stems in part from the way the resource has been taken for granted, the paper says. Communities and businesses have historically undervalued water, which has led to short-sighted management.
“Water is often treated as an input cost rather than a strategic asset, making it easy to defer investment until a crisis forces action.” the report says. “Quantifying the economic value of water, and the financial risks of inadequate supply, poor quality, or failing infrastructure, changes that calculus.”
The paper cites six reasons why water systems have reached this point: weak and uncoordinated governance, gaps in the way the infrastructure is financed and in the skills of the people who work in the field, inadequate pathways for moving innovations to market, reactive management and the resource’s unrecognized market value. **I’d use semicolons to break these up**
“Water management [is] misaligned with today’s risks,” the report says.
Getting the infrastructure to an adequate condition requires tackling the problems at multiple levels, the report says. It starts with changes in the way the infrastructure is governed at the local, state and federal levels, rethinking the role of rural areas — where most water infrastructure is managed — and changing how organizations prepare infrastructure for disasters, among other things, Aspen says.
From a facilities perspective, managers may want to start thinking of what modernizing the infrastructure means. “Sensors, data systems, and analytical tools” should be part of the mix, the report says.
“Nearly one-fifth of treated drinking water never reaches customers,” the report says. “Approximately 87% of this loss [stems] from leaks, pipe bursts, and other real infrastructure failures.”
The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provided $82.5 billion to upgrade water systems but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the $625 billion for drinking water systems and $460 billion for wastewater and stormwater systems that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says is needed by 2040, the report says.
Litigation delays that are a regular feature of infrastructure development in the U.S.are also a roadblock and make water projects “slower and more expensive than in many peer countries,” the report says.
The report calls for moving away from large-scale “gray” infrastructure projects to smaller-scale systems that rely on existing geographic features. “Natural systems can address multiple issues, such as attenuating stormwater runoff and improving water quality, while providing co-benefits such as increased greenspace,” the report says.
It pointed to an EPA study that looked at a dozen stormwater projects that use low-impact development techniques. All but one had lower costs than the conventional alternative.
Technology upgrades could help, too. “New monitoring tools such as smart meters can generate vast amounts of data, yet water managers often struggle to extract useful insights due to the lack of a complete digital ecosystem, from modern Internet of Things (IoT) system integration to data analytics and technical capacity,” the report says.
A survey of the country’s 50 largest water and wastewater utilities found they use only a tenth of the data their systems generate.
A lack of talent to leverage technology is another challenge. “While nearly 80% of water utilities have a capital improvement plan, less than 55% have a workforce plan,” the report says.
“The gap between what’s possible and what’s practical keeps widening,” the report concludes. “Infrastructure built decades ago is deteriorating, contaminants once unknown now require removal, and precipitation patterns have diverged from historical norms.”
