Financial feasibility of end-user designed rainwater harvesting and greywater reuse systems for high water use households

Oviedo-Oca�a, Edgar Ricardo; Dominguez, Isabel; Ward, Sarah; Rivera-Sanchez, Miryam Lizeth; Zaraza-Pe�a, Julian Mauricio

Abstract

© 2017, The Author(s). Water availability pressures, competing end-uses and sewers at capacity are all drivers for change in urban water management. Rainwater harvesting (RWH) and greywater reuse (GWR) systems constitute alternatives to reduce drinking water usage and in the case of RWH, reduce roof runoff entering sewers. Despite the increasing popularity of installations in commercial buildings, RWH and GWR technologies at a household scale have proved less popular, across a range of global contexts. For systems designed from the top-down, this is often due to the lack of a favourable cost-benefit (where subsidies are unavailable), though few studies have focused on performing full capital and operational financial assessments, particularly in high water consumption households. Using a bottom-up design approach, based on a questionnaire survey with 35 households in a residential complex in Bucaramanga, Colombia, this article considers the initial financial feasibility of three RWH and GWR system configurations proposed for high water using households (equivalent to >203L per capita per day). A full capital and operational financial assessment was performed at a more detailed level for the most viable design using historic rainfall data. For the selected configuration (‘Alt 2’), the estimated potable water saving was 44% (equivalent to 131m3/year) with a rate of return on investment of 6.5% and an estimated payback period of 23years. As an initial end-user-driven design exercise, these results are promising and constitute a starting point for facilitating such approaches to urban water management at the household scale.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 24, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Mar 30, 2017
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2018
• Deposit Date: Oct 31, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 2, 2018
• Journal: Environmental Science and Pollution Research
• Print ISSN: 0944-1344
• Electronic ISSN: 1614-7499
• Publisher: Springer (part of Springer Nature)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 25
• Issue: 20
• Pages: 19200-19216
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-017-8710-5
• Keywords: alternative water supply systems, Colombia, end-user, financial feasibility, greywater reuse, rainwater harvesting
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/863922
• Publisher URL: http://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-017-8710-5
• Contract Date: Oct 31, 2018