Performance and Cost-Based Comparison of Green and Gray Infrastructure to Control Combined Sewer Overflows

How does climate change affect combined sewer overflow in a system benefiting from rainwater harvesting systems?

“…Where C is the underdrain coefficient, n is the drain exponent, and h is the water height from the drain offset (cm). Based on the number of flushes per person per day in Toledo (5.1 flush/person/day (Vickers 2001)), average number of building occupants in Toledo (2.36 (U.S. Census Bureau 2014)), and 0.5 as a typical value for n, C was selected as 0.23 cm/hr recommended by Tavakol-Davani et al (2015).…”

Sustainability Strategies at the Water–Energy Nexus: Renewable Energy and Decentralized Infrastructure

“…A decentralized green water‐infrastructure system (DGWIS) is defined as one that integrates locally available water sources (i.e., rainwater and graywater) with renewable local energy sources (i.e., solar and wind) to support potable and nonpotable water services tailored to meet the needs of the specific customer class (i.e., domestic, commercial, industrial, or institutional). Decentralized rainwater harvesting and graywater recycling have long been identified as alternative water sources for overall sustainable management of water resources (Tavakol‐Davani et al ; Walsh et al ; Agudelo‐Vera et al , ; Agudelo‐Vera et al ; Pidou et al ; Dixon et al ). Furthermore, the general characteristics of graywater and rainwater harvesting systems have been studied by many researchers (Malinowski et al , NWRI , Eriksson et al , Li et al , Pidou et al ).…”

“…To meet these goals, the water industry should consider integrating renewable energy into urban water infrastructure to reduce the sector's dependency on fossil fuel–based electricity use. Practical applications and novel research in the domain of renewable energy applications for water infrastructure are rapidly evolving (Lee et al ; Dallman et al ; Tavakol‐Davani et al ; Walsh et al ; Agudelo‐Vera 2012a, 2012b; Agudelo‐Vera et al ; Pidou et al ; Dixon et al ); however, at present only limited examples exist in the literature of powering water infrastructure with renewable energy sources.…”

Introducing demand to supply ratio as a new metric for understanding life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from rainwater harvesting systems

“…Common uses of harvested rainwater are toilet flushing (Bronchi et al, 1999;Fewkes, 1998;Furumai, 2008;Ghimire et al, 2014;Devkota et al, 2013;Angrill et al, 2012;Tavakol-Davani et al, 2015), irrigation (Li and Gong, 2002;Stout et al, 2015), laundry washing (Bronchi et al, 1999;Angrill et al, 2012), car and parking lot cleaning (Ghisi et al, 2009;Villarreal and Dixon, 2005), and water cooling (Furumai, 2008). Use of harvested rainwater in toilet flushing is especially promising because it constitutes a large fraction (27%) of indoor non-potable water use (Mayer and William, 1999;Vickers, 2001) that does not require significant water treatment (Krishna, 2005;Herrmann and Schimda, 2000;Coombes et al, 2002).…”