Wastewater as a Resource: Sustainable Management and Utilization

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue seeks original research and review articles focusing on the sustainable management and utilization of wastewater as a resource. Additionally, it aims to re-frame municipal, industrial, and agricultural wastewater as a renewable stock of water, energy, nutrients, and materials. Rapid urbanization, tightening discharge limits, and the global push toward carbon neutrality are converging to make wastewater one of the last under-exploited circular-economy assets. We therefore invite contributions that advance the science, engineering, and governance required to (i) recover clean water with minimum life-cycle energy and chemical footprints, (ii) harvest embedded resources such as carbon–biogas, nitrogen, phosphorus, cellulose, metals, and so on, and (iii) integrate these recovery loops into resilient, climate-positive urban–rural systems.

We particularly invite contributions that advance next-generation resource-recovery schemes—enabled by novel materials such as high-selectivity adsorbents or anti-fouling membranes—and that provide rigorous evidence of their performance at pilot or full scale. Priority will be given to studies that couple water-purification targets with simultaneous valorization of critical resources from municipal wastewater, high-salinity, or toxic industrial liquors. Interdisciplinary work integrating artificial-intelligence optimization, carbon-neutral design principles, and energy–economic analysis is strongly encouraged.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Low-carbon water-treatment technologies; 
• Novel adsorbents and membrane materials for wastewater valorization; 
• Photothermal desalination and freshwater recovery systems; 
• Anaerobic and bio-electrochemical processes; 
• Recovery of nutrients, proteins, and extracellular polysaccharides; 
• Cellulose, alginate, bioplastics, and value-added products from sludge and side-streams; 
• Metal and rare-element recovery;
• Life-cycle costing, socio-technical acceptance, and circular-economy business models;
• Policy instruments, water–energy–food nexus governance and stakeholder engagement;
• Case studies of large-scale, replicable “wastewater-as-a-resource” implementations.

Dr. Shuoxun Dong
Dr. Yuchi Chen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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