Urban domestic wastewater: how to reduce individual injection?

The present paper aims to identify ways to reduce pollution injected by residents in the urban wastewater network system. Two approaches are considered. The first one uses flow and pollutant calculation to test whether a polluter can easily be identified in a neighborhood. The second approach uses a survey to examine what incentive would be most effective to influence residents’ behavior. Hydrodynamic simulation results show that concentration profiles at the network outlet corresponding to all possible polluters are similar and thus do not point out specific resident source of pollution. Household-level survey results show that most socio-economic and public-good-related characteristics do not play a significant role in explaining choices to discard in the home wastewater network. Apart from the nature of the waste itself, by far the belief that the respondent has about neighbors’ and relatives’ discarding behavior is the main driver of the choice.