Sustainability Index Evaluation of the Rainwater Harvesting System in Six US Urban Cities

Daeryong Park and Myoung-Jin Um
Additional contact information
Daeryong Park: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Konkuk University, Seoul 05029, Korea
Myoung-Jin Um: School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, Korea

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-16

Abstract: This study investigated the sustainability of the rainwater harvesting system (RWHS) by analyzing six urban city sites with different rainfall statistics in the United States. We developed a new RWHS performance model by modifying a spreadsheet-based storage, treatment, and overflow runoff model (SS STORM) and verified its performance by comparing with another analytical RWHS model. The sustainability index (SI) evaluation method was used for a reservoir system and applied to the RWHS, employing modified resilience and vulnerability evaluation methods due to the different characteristics of a reservoir and the RWHS. The performance of modified SS STORM is very similar to that of the analytical method, except in Los Angeles, which is characterized by long inter-event times and low rainfall event depths due to low annual rainfall. The sustainability indices were successfully evaluated depending on both RWHS size and water demand and vary over a wide range as annual rainfall increases. This study proposes a new RWHS performance model and sustainability index evaluation method. Further study should confirm the proposed approach in regions with widely different rainfall characteristics.

Keywords: analytical method; modified SS STORM; reliability; resilience; sustainability; vulnerability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/1/280/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/1/280/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:1:p:280-:d:128089

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().