Innovation in Action
Enabling Water Smart Communities is a collaborative project led by Anglian Water with partners including Thames Water, United Utilities, Arup, and support from Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, leading academics, developers and housing associations.
As our population grows, the pressure on our water services is increasingly stressed. Housing development in England is set to increase rapidly, with nearly 3 million new households to be built by 2041. This stresses our water and wastewater services to an unsustainable position.
The existing water network is old and hard to retrofit. But where new housing developments are planned there’s an opportunity to rethink how water arrives at the taps and work with the construction industry to do things differently. This could be flushing toilets with harvested rainwater or adding a pipe that goes to the washing machine, toilet and outdoor tap with non-potable water. By using harvested rainwater, models show that the household demand for water can be reduced by 30-50%.
In practice this could mean harnessing non-potable water with dedicated rainwater harvesting or dedicated sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) which integrates nature into the urban setting.
The project has a three year timeline and will run until December 2025, split into four phases. Discovery, Definition, Development and Delivery. We are now in the Discovery phase which includes research papers from academics and will inform how the project will deliver the most impact.
Definition phase begins in April 2023 and will gather the insight from discovery to directly define the challenge we face. This phase will narrow down our solutions into a concise strategy for development.
Development will begin in July 2023 and gives answers to the clearly defined problems, seeking inspiration from elsewhere and designing direct solutions with a range of different people and environments.
Delivery will begin in March 2024 and involves deployment of solutions at a small scale, based on the framework developed by the previous three phases.
The Ofwat Innovation Fund:
The project is funded through the Ofwat Water Breakthrough Challenge Fund Transform Stream.
The transform stream aims to spark ambitious innovation and enable new approaches and ways of working, equipping the water sector to address the big challenges facing the sector.
The project was awarded funding in July 2022.
