A Resource Recovery Perspective for Improving the Quality and Productivity of Urban Soils.

Federal, state, and local agencies need to be forward thinking in their decision making by considering different natural resource domains simultaneously.  Evaluating how decisions in one domain, such as land use, will affect decisions in other domains, such as water use or food production, will become more important as high quality natural resources continually become scarcer.  These considerations become especially important for large metropolitan regions that historically have brought in food, soil, and water resources from outlying areas and then spent tremendous amounts of money and resources to haul waste away from urban centers.  This historical conceptual framework is changing as cities recognize the intrinsic value of waste streams as resource streams to be recovered and reused back in the metropolitan region. This poster presents how nutrient and water resources can be recovered from wastewater streams and re-used in metropolitan regions as reclaimed water and biosolids. Helping to create new parkland using biosolids in the Chicago region as part of the region’s sustainability efforts for more open and green space is presented as an example of how the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago is using biosolids to create renewed urban soils and making sustainability linkages across water and land use domains.