“Safe and reliable water supplies are critical to our nation’s communities and economy,” said Wayne Cascio, acting principal deputy assistant administrator for Science in EPA’s Office of Research and Development. “The research funded by these grants will coordinate water reuse research, help identify critical science gaps and accelerate opportunities for reuse.”

The grants come at a time when he US is exploring reclamation and reuse of wastewater to significantly increase the country’s total available water resources. When recycling wastewater, a chief public health concern is the risk posed by the presence of viruses that can infect humans, which, as the environmental watchdog notes, can be difficult to reduce with traditional sewage treatment approaches, the EPA said.

Cascio said the agency expects the research from these grants to provide information that will enable wastewater operators, reuse projects and state and local regulators to ensure the public is protected from these viruses when reusing municipal wastewater for various reuse applications.

The five Nationals Priorities grants just announced will go to projects in five states.

In Massachusetts, the Barnstable County Department of Health and Environment and the state department of environmental protection are seeking to identify wastewater technologies and treatment processes capable of removing viruses, to allow safe reuse of the treated wastewater as well as to evaluate the use of five surrogates as possible indicators for presence of human viruses during treatment process.

In New Orleans Louisiana, researchers at Tulane University are  working toward designing improved viral surrogate approaches that address challenges and shortcomings of current methodologies, including low concentrations of viruses in wastewater, detection, and a lack of specificity for addressing human health risk.

The University of California at Irvine, Irvine is to conducting research that will result in recommendations of the best methods for identifying the viral risk for non-potable water reuse and standard operating procedures for these methods.

At Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan plans to develop surrogate-based frameworks for virus control through water recycling facilities, while in Denver, Colorado, the Water Research Foundation is attempting to identify chemical and/or viral surrogates for virus reduction during wastewater treatment processes in real-world systems and create reduction methods for each treatment process.

Author: Dede Williams, Freelance Journalist