If We Build It, Will They Use It? Aligning Resource Recovery Design with Place-Based Social Systems

Recovering water, nutrients, energy, and critical materials from waste streams is essential for building resilient and circular water systems. Yet many recovery technologies fail to achieve adoption or persistence beyond pilot scales because they overlook the social and institutional contexts that shape implementation. This Perspective reframes resource recovery as an adaptive challenge, i.e., one that depends as much on governance capacity, trust, and collective learning as on technical optimization. We propose a watershed- and place-based framework that situates recovery systems within the ecological and institutional boundaries where communities, infrastructure, and governance intersect. Within this discussion, the Community Capitals Framework offers a practical tool to operationalize places and diagnose social readiness by mapping the human, social, financial, and political assets that enable or constrain system adoption. Finally, we highlight the role of the engineer as a boundary spanner, who bridges technical and social domains to coproduce solutions that are legitimate, resilient, and locally grounded. This Perspective advances existing socio-technical approaches by integrating watershed-scale governance, place-based design, and the Community Capitals Framework into a single, operational lens that helps engineers diagnose implementation barriers and intentionally design resource recovery systems for social legitimacy, resilience, and long-term adoption.