Wastewater and Stormwater infrastructure in the 2017 ASCE report Card received a D+. This is up from the 2013 report card grade of D.
This is in part due to the fact there has been some innovation with the treatment plants to ensure protection against flooding and cross-contamination and new more efficient and modern techniques being used to preserve water and reuse waste.
However, to keep this protection and innovation more funding is necessary.
The state of the USA wastewater and stormwater system is in desperate need of more funding according to the ASCE.
According to this report, 95 percent of funding is made at a local level regarding water infrastructure.
Fifty-six million Americans will be on centralized treatment plants by 2032, which means that increased levels of funding will be needed to meet this demand and quality.
Although the Federal Government is providing some funding to states for such treatment of water, there is still a gap of around $100 billion that is needed to manage the upkeep of the treatment plants.
The ASCE in its report suggested that to finance the infrastructure, awareness of the lack of funding should be raised, legislative methods should be used and other methods such as bonds and taxes should be applied in order to raise more funds and induce investment into the industry while also encouraging green infrastructure to make communities management of waste and stormwater more effective.
This brief analysis from the ASCE report shows that without more awareness and funding, the state of the USA’s waste and stormwater systems may have an uncertain future at best.
The application of infrastructure management planning, asset lifecycle analysis, and from this analysis the development of long-term expenditure projections will assist communities with understanding funding requirements for water and wastewater systems.
This in-turn will assist communities with a discussion regarding how the required funding requirements can be met.
[…] and other words like it may well become more common in the dictionary of the wastewater and water infrastructure asset management practitioners as more cities turn to green infrastructure in an effort to manage their overflow […]