'Don't think of 'waste'water': Evaluation and planning tools for reuse-oriented sanitation infrastructure

The conventional conception of human waste as a disposal problem has stimulated limited financial and managerial commitment to its safe handling in most developing urban areas. Today, with over 2.6 billion people unserved, delivering effective and reliable urban sanitation is one of the world's biggest challenges. The point of departure for this dissertation is the contention that re-conceiving human waste as a resource can achieve outcomes that are more environmentally and economically sustainable, and also more robust over the long-term, than conventional design-for-disposal schemes. To help actualize that shift, I develop two decision support tools, the Burden to Capacity Sustainability Assessment (B2C SA) and Design for Service (DFS) planning approach. The B2C SA contributes quantitative rigor to the claim that waste is a resource by enumerating its value in the region of interest. DFS is the first sanitation planning tool that is explicitly reuse-oriented, and that through a five-step process can guide planners to a scheme that is tailored to the urban settlement it will serve. I apply these tools to three different case studies in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China to demonstrate their utility. The results demonstrate how strategic, reuse-oriented sanitation can be leveraged to contribute to the local economy and to environmental goals and objectives in ways that go far beyond those associated with a conventional wastewater treatment plant.