Water-Centric Planning

Prescription and nonprescription pharmaceuticals or their metabolites have been reported to occur at very small concentrations in some finished drinking water samples in the U.S.

This article explains that, “Water and wastewater utilities, like most organizations, are commonly organized into functional departments that tend to become organizational silos focused on achieving their own individual objectives.”

The author states that, “From a melting pot to a salad bowl, there are many ways to describe the diversity of people that make up any large North American city. In a diverse urban workplace, different types of people can go beyond merely coexisting and, through their diversity, create exciting work environments.”

The issue of lead in drinking water should be raised within the context of a holistic environmental approach that addresses all sources of lead exposure, especially for children.

This article explains the presence of measurable pharmaceutical residuals originating in municipal sewage, which, in turn, provides a means of predicting the likely appearance of individual contaminants in effluents and downstream water sources.

Utilities have long focused on their physical infrastructures. Today’s management environment warrants growing attention to “human capital.”

Most water utility managers don’t classify public outreach as an integral part of utility management. But, that’s an “unfortunate attitude because experience clearly demonstrates the value of devoting public outreach resources on major issues and projects early on instead of after the fact.”

It has been suggested recently that water and sewage utilities move to “full-cost” accounting as a means of addressing some of the challenges facing them. However, there are disagreements regarding how to implement this concept, and few estimates exist that show the impact of such a change.

In this paper, the Canadian experience with water reuse and recycling is reviewed under five theme areas: technology; policy and regulation; research; public acceptance; and coordination. At present, water reuse and recycling in Canada is practiced on a relatively small scale and varies regionally depending on the availability of water supplies and regulatory flexibility.

An integrated water resources management model for Canada, “CanadaWater”, has been developed using the system dynamics simulation approach. The “CanadaWater” model takes into consideration dynamic interactions between quantitative characteristics of the available water resources, and water use that are determined by the socio-economic development level, population and physiographic features of Canada’s territory.