CAREER: Sustainable Pipelines for America's Water Infrastructure through Life Cycle Assessment and Workforce Development

Water infrastructure in the U.S. faces many challenges for long-term sustainability. In Kentucky, particularly in the Appalachian region, water distribution systems, which transport water from the point of treatment to the point of consumption, are unique and complex. The various challenges include topography of the region, insufficient revenue from a declining customer base, and decreasing numbers of licensed operators – the people who work daily to make sure water safely gets to customers. Collectively, these deficiencies have led to unsustainable water infrastructure systems, both in terms of the physical infrastructure and the workforce required to operate it. This project seeks to advance the sustainability of physical water workforce pipelines while strengthening new and existing pipelines for individuals to join the water workforce. This work will identify what drives the sustainability of water distribution systems while simultaneously engaging the workforce who could use this information for decision-making. This work is timely due to unprecedented investments in U.S. infrastructure, which should be capitalized on by prioritizing sustainability to ensure long-term benefits for the physical infrastructure and the workforce needed to design, operate, and manage it. This project will develop sustainable pipelines – advancing U.S. water infrastructure sustainability by (1) integrating sustainability assessments into water distribution system planning and management and (2) preparing a sustainability-minded workforce for the nation’s water infrastructure. The first goal – to integrate sustainability assessments into water distribution system planning and management – will be addressed by developing life cycle environmental and economic models for water distribution systems and leveraging Kentucky Infrastructure Authority’s existing datasets to evaluate hundreds of systems, identify sustainability drivers, and develop a state-level screening assessment for informed decision-making. The second goal – to prepare a sustainability-minded workforce for the nation’s water infrastructure – will take a multi-level approach to water workforce development by engaging new entrants to the workforce through partnerships with prisons in Kentucky and training the current and future workforce in sustainability thinking. This project will advance fundamental understanding of drivers of sustainability for water distribution systems while addressing unique challenges for water distribution systems in Kentucky. Ultimately, this work can increase U.S. economic competitiveness by providing a path to consider long-term sustainability when investing the billions of dollars planned for drinking water infrastructure. This project is jointly funded by the ENG/CBET Environmental Sustainability program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.