As climate change and urbanization affect current water management systems, new solutions and approaches rooted in public acceptance are needed to ensure future water supply. In this study, we examine public attitudes to reuse of recycled water and associated worldviews, values, and perceptions in a site without historical water issues. A survey of 143 randomly sampled residents in the municipality of the growing Swedish town Knivsta revealed that 81.4% of the respondents had a positive attitude towards using recycled water in general. The results did not indicate any differences in attitudes between those living in and outside the municipality's urban areas. Perceived benefits and risks were found to be significantly related to both attitudes towards using recycled water in general and to the extreme case of using it for drinking purposes. Additionally, trust in public authorities was highly predictive of attitudes towards drinking recycled water. Furthermore, attitudes were found to be related to an environmental worldview and underlying biospheric, altruistic, and hedonic values. This indicates a need to consider the intended purpose as well as engaging with underlying values as part of the technology legitimation process for improving the chances of successful implementation of water recycling technologies.

The development of new urban areas offers a unique opportunity to improve urban resource management, where a more local resource provisioning, through decentralized and integrated infrastructure systems, can be put forward as an alternative approach for potentially reducing the environmental impact and increasing the resilience of vital functions. This study is based on a transdisciplinary workshop series with local stakeholders in the Swedish municipality of Knivsta, where a conceptual model illustrating a future decentralized and integrated infrastructure system was iteratively developed, resulting in a possible design with high societal relevance and feasibility due to this transdisciplinary process. The performance of selected solutions, in terms of the annual level of self-sufficiency in energy, water, and nutrients, was quantified, where the potential for a local provisioning of resources in a typical multifamily building neighborhood in Knivsta was up to 66% for heat, 24% for transportation, and 38% for vegetable supply. For a neighborhood with the same population, but with single-family houses requiring a larger area for both the buildings and private gardens per person, the potential was 31% for heat, 10% for transportation, and 210% for vegetable supply. Electricity, water, and graywater management could be fully supplied in all studied cases. Our findings demonstrate that decentralization and integration can provide important opportunities for utilizing resources in the urban environment, contributing to the desired functions of energy, water, and nutrients, even in countries with relatively cold and dark climates, although these are not enough for urban areas to be fully self-sufficient with their current levels of resource consumption.

Increased self-sufficiency and circularity are often presented as means to decrease the environmental impact from urban resource management, but more knowledge is needed about how this approach in fact compares with conventional systems from a life-cycle perspective when resource consumption and emissions from both the production and for running the processes are included. This paper presents the results from a life-cycle assessment for energy, water, and wastewater systems in a Swedish, urban neighbourhood where local, more self-sufficient and circular systems, including solar power, rainwater harvesting, and resource recovery from wastewater, were compared to conventional, centralized systems. The analysis revealed that the cases with local systems had a lower marine eutrophication and land use impact, but they did not decrease the environmental impact in terms of global warming, mineral resource depletion, and freshwater eutrophication in this site with well developed, efficient conventional systems. There were however differences between the subsystems, such as a lower global warming potential for local wastewater management due to avoided impacts from resource recovery. Local systems also had advantages under certain conditions, such as in neighbourhoods with large infrastructure networks per person and long distances to connect to the existing infrastructure grids. For planners and decision-makers, this study indicates that self-sufficiency is currently rather motivated by other benefits than decreased environmental impact in places with similar conditions to this study. It also highlights that these systems are more worthwhile from an environmental perspective in the above-mentioned conditions or in sites with larger environmental impact from the conventional systems. For producers, some key areas for improvement to decrease the environmental impact include production of photovoltaic modules and batteries for electricity, leakage of refrigerant from heat pumps for the heat supply, production of the storage tank for rainwater collection, production of expanded clay as filter material for the greywater treatment, production of sodium hydroxide for blackwater treatment, and emissions in operation for both greywater and blackwater treatment.