Sustainable innovation in wastewater management: lessons for nutrient recovery and reuse

Urine diversion (UD) has great potential to contribute to sustainably managing wastewater by separating urine at the source and recovering nutrients for reuse in agriculture. While factors enabling the UD technology in Sweden are thought to involve policies supporting nutrient recovery/reuse, on clo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Local environment 2013-08, Vol.18 (7), p.769-780
Main Authors: Fam, Dena M., Mitchell, Cynthia A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agriculture
Animal, plant and microbial ecology
Applied ecology
Applied sciences
Biological and medical sciences
Conservation, protection and management of environment and wildlife
Decision making
Disabled
end-user perspectives
Environment
Environment and sustainable development
Environmental policy
Exact sciences and technology
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
General aspects
Innovation
Inspection
Norms
nutrient recovery
Nutrients
Policies
Pollution
Recovery
Regulation
Resource recovery
Reuse
Sanitation
social innovation
Social organization
Strategic management
strategic niche management
Success
Success factors
Sweden
Technology
Technology adoption
transition management
Urine
urine diversion
Waste management
Waste water
Wastewater management
Wastewaters
Water treatment
Water treatment and pollution
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Summary:Urine diversion (UD) has great potential to contribute to sustainably managing wastewater by separating urine at the source and recovering nutrients for reuse in agriculture. While factors enabling the UD technology in Sweden are thought to involve policies supporting nutrient recovery/reuse, on closer inspection, the variable success of UD systems has revealed that critical factors for success also relate to human-centred issues of social organisation, participation and incorporation of social knowledges of a variety of stakeholders into the decision-making process in which new technologies are trialled and adopted. Through the analytical lens of strategic niche management, we consider how early experimentation in UD has involved user participation and whether internal processes of learning, networking and visioning have been consciously considered and to what effect. As niche experiments are enabled/disabled not only by informal institutions such as values and social norms but also formal regulatory institutions, we have concurrently analysed the broader environment in which policies and institutions influence, to varying degrees, the uptake of UD.
ISSN:1354-9839
1469-6711
DOI:10.1080/13549839.2012.716408