Managed aquifer recharge: rediscovering nature as a leading edge technology

摘要

Use of Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) has rapidly increased in Australia, USA, and Europenin recent years as an efficient means of recycling stormwater or treated sewage effluent fornnon-potable and indirect potable reuse in urban and rural areas. Yet aquifers have been reliednon knowingly for water storage and unwittingly for water treatment for millennia. Hence ifn‘leading edge’ is defined as ‘the foremost part of a trend; a vanguard’, it would be misleadingnto claim managed aquifer recharge as a leading edge technology. However it has takenna significant investment in scientific research in recent years to demonstrate the effectivenessnof aquifers as sustainable treatment systems to enable managed aquifer recharge to benrecognised along side engineered treatment systems in water recycling. It is a ‘cross-over’ntechnology that is applicable to water and wastewater treatment and makes use of passivenlow energy processes to spectacularly reduce the energy requirements for water supply.nIt is robust within limits, has low cost, is suitable from village to city scale supplies,nand offers as yet almost untapped opportunities for producing safe drinking waternsupplies where they do not yet exist. It will have an increasingly valued role in securingnwater supplies to sustain cities affected by climate change and population growth. However itnis not a universal panacea and relies on the presence of suitable aquifers and sources ofnwater together with effective governance to ensure human health and environmentnprotection and water resources planning and management. This paper describes managednaquifer recharge, illustrates its use in Australia, outlining economics, guidelines and policies,nand presents some of the knowledge about aquifer treatment processes that are revealingnthe latent value of aquifers as urban water infrastructure and provide a driver to improvingnour understanding of urban hydrogeology.