Moving beyond compliance, this case explores how impact assessment can support more circular industrial water reuse through earlier, integrated decision-making.
Water scarcity, ongoing wastewater generation, limited storage capacity, and regulatory requirements are driving industrial facilities to reconsider traditional linear water management approaches. Wastewater treatment and reuse is increasingly framed as a circular economy solution, where waste streams are returned to productive use. However, does water reuse automatically represent a transition towards circularity?
Using a hypothetical industrial water reuse case informed by practitioner experience, a treatment and reuse system is considered that aims to reduce freshwater demand, improve wastewater management and support continued operations. While offering circularity benefits, the solution introduces trade-offs including new infrastructure impacts, increased energy demand and secondary waste streams.
The case demonstrates how impact assessment (IA) can help identify and navigate these trade-offs, particularly where project decisions are initially driven by operational needs and regulatory compliance. Earlier integration of circular thinking into IA and project development can broaden the questions asked and alternatives identified, while allowing environmental considerations to influence engineering design.
IA can therefore play an important role in enabling circular transitions, but only if circularity is considered beyond the immediate benefits of reuse. Early collaboration between developers, engineers, environmental practitioners and regulators, together with consideration of system-wide impacts, can support more balanced and genuinely circular decision-making.
Daniella Kristensen is an Environmental Assessment Practitioner at Jones & Wagener with over four years’ experience in environmental assessment and an interest in practical sustainability approaches.