Scaling up resource recovery from wastewater: A socio-technical perspective

Resource recovery has gained substantial traction in urban water management in recent years, promising exciting opportunities for utilities to develop novel services, new income streams, and/or expand the environmental benefits of their operations. However, success stories that substantiate the high hopes remain scant. We will argue that a transition of the sanitation sector from providing a public good of waste disposal to running a resource mining venture will require a systemic innovation process in which technical, organizational, and regulatory routines of involved actors will be deeply reshuffled. We review the state of knowledge on the opportunities and barriers for scaling up innovative resource recovery solutions from wastewater and illustrate them with three short case studies of existing resource recovery systems. While the complexity of inducing resource recovery should not be underestimated, transformative innovation trajectories can be successful if technological, social, and organizational challenges are strategically and holistically addressed.