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Water supply and reuse through non-conventional water resources can significantly decrease the stress on natural water resources. Decentralized systems can help not only to alleviate issues of water security in arid areas, but also to create a sustainable framework within a circular economy. Although these small-scale innovative technologies are able to achieve ready-to-use, high quality of recovered/treated water on-site, the loop cannot be closed in most cases due to legislative barriers. Similarly, the end-use of sewage sludge after treatment in decentralized systems still lacks specific regulations that limit its valorization. This work analyzes the current policy and legislations related to water supply, wastewater treatment, water reuse and resource valorization within the context of decentralized state-of-the-art technologies applied in rural areas. The drawbacks in the current EU legislation that set barriers to close water-related loops in European countries are highlighted. A regulatory fitness check was applied to each type of loop to identify the key factors to accomplish the legislative compliance, and financing pathways were further evaluated at the EU level. As a possible solution, further development of an innovation deal approach is recommended to address the environmental, regulatory and financial gaps in water management through an integrated framework, providing ad-hoc policies and prescriptions for sustainable reuse of all water resources. • Regulatory fitness check was applied to closed water loops to identify legislative and financing barriers. • Current EU legislatives do not provide ad-hoc guidelines to decentralized systems. • No general barriers were detected for the reuse of reclaimed water in the EU legislation. • Serious limitations exist on drinking water production from non-conventional water resources. • Major constraints were determined for EC-marked compost for organic farming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cost benefit analysis (CBA) and social impact assessment are well established methodologies to systematically estimate the viability of investments on technologies as well as the benefits for the society. However, there is a limited application of these assessment methods in the wastewater sector especially for resource recovery to deliver circularity objectives within urban water cycle management. In this regard, the Horizon 2020 SMART-Plant Innovation Action aimed to evaluate holistic impacts of wastewater-based resource recovery by applying and adapting cost benefit and social analysis on innovative technologies (SMARTechs). The SMARTechs were implemented and validated in real wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) across Europe and Mediterranean basin where potential impacts in terms of carbon, material and energy efficiency, recovery and safe reuse were defined. Sixteen bottom-up SMARTech scenarios were analysed for the estimation of technical, economic and social impacts using CBA, social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) and social readiness level (SRL) methods. Overall, the SMARTechs created benefits both from an environmental and social point of view, with a maximum relative total economic value up to +23% compared to baseline scenario (without any SMARTech implementation). In terms of social benefits, the S-LCA highlighted a global positive impact of all the SMARTechs in terms of technical characteristics and social acceptance. Specifically, SMARTech 1 (cellulose recovery) was the most socially accepted solution thanks to its high performance and simplicity. Finally, based on the SRL assessment, most of the SMARTechs were positioned within the SRL range of 6–7, which implies a good societal acceptance and adaptation potential. • Socio-economic impacts of wastewater-based resource recovery were determined. • Nine different technologies were evaluated in sixteen bottom-up scenarios. • CBA and S-LCA were carried out leading to TEV and SRL. • Cellulose recovery scored the highest relative TEV and social acceptance. • Most of the technologies fell within a SRL range of 6–7. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]