Wastewater Reuse in Agriculture: Opportunities, Challenges, and Solutions

Wastewater reuse for farm irrigation has a long history around the world. Population growth, influx of rural communities into cities, the ensuing over-urbanization, elevated living standards, and industrialization are among the many factors that have led to the production of escalating volumes of wastewater and industrial effluents beyond the self-purifying capacity of the surrounding limited land areas where they are produced. However, this devastating challenge may be transformed into an opportunity by reusing the wastewater as a source of water, materials, and energy. The recent technological developments in wastewater treatment have offered ample opportunities to obtain effluents of a wide range of qualities for a wide array of uses including drinking water. The availability of such technologies makes it possible to imagine every possibility for wastewater reuse toward agricultural irrigation. The question that remains, however, is whether the effluent quality thus obtained can be economically matched with the quality requirements of a given water reuse. This requires practicable water quality standards, guidelines, and criteria provisioned for different water reuses in compliance with environmental quality standards. Treatment effluent reuse for irrigation should in any case be envisioned as part of an Integrated Sustainable Waste Management System in which the different stages of waste production, separation, collection, transfer, and treatment are accomplished in cooperation with stakeholders. Concepts such as reduced waste production, reuse, and recycle playing special roles in this integrated system should be based on waste viewed as a renewable resource rather than one to dispose of.