ACCELERATING ENVIRONMENTAL EQUITY

Associate professor Kaoru Ikuma is leading a project to normalize and accelerate water reuse for rural communities. Water reuse is already implemented in small ways across the nation, especially in urban areas, but society still tends to turn their noses up at the thought of drinking what used to be “unusable” water.

Ikuma and her team received a $3.246 million grant from the United States Environmental Protection Agency for this project, called “Accelerating Technical and Community Readiness for Water Reuse in Small Systems” and spanning four years. Iowa State is the lead institution, with Ikuma as the principal investigator on the project. The team is also working with the University of Rhode Island and the University of California Berkeley.

“What we are going to do is focus on small, rural communities across the United States that tend to be really left behind from a lot of water policies and funding,” Ikuma said. “So how can we help accelerate their readiness to adopt water reuse if it looks feasible?”

The goal is to develop community-scale tools that consider water availability, projection with climate change, and the holistic cost of water use, including human and environmental factors. The team will focus on providing plausible, low-input technologies that are both cost-effective and socially acceptable. By approaching the issue from technical, social and economic angles, the aim is to lower barriers for small, rural communities, promoting water reuse even in regions not traditionally associated with water scarcity, like Iowa, where water quality challenges persist.

“A lot of the decisions that these communities can make right now are expensive, and there’s not a lot of flexibility built in for rural communities that are struggling but still need to provide clean, safe water and sanitation services,” Ikuma said. “Overall, our work will hopefully lower barriers for more rural communities, to consider what we’re broadly calling water reuse, and we will create a game plan for them to do so.”