The Effects of Agricultural and Urban Land Use on Drinking Water Treatment Costs: An Analysis of United States Community Water Systems.

ABSTRACT: For community water providers, safeguarding source waters from contamination offers an additional barrier of protection and a potential means of avoiding in-plant treatment costs. Whether source water protection efforts are cost-effective relative to in-plant treatment requires hydrologic, geologic, and climatologic knowledge of source watersheds, as well as an understanding of how changes in source water quality affect treatment costs. Quantitative evidence on the latter relationship is limited. This study estimates separate hedonic cost functions for water systems that primarily use surface water sources and those that primarily use groundwater sources using a database of United States (US) Community Water Systems. Cost functions relate annual variable treatment cost to production, facto

SUBMITTER: Price JI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8340599 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature