Stormwater Harvesting from Roof Catchments: A Review of Design, Efficiency, and Sustainability

Abstract

Roof runoff is collected rainwater from a roof using a rainwater harvesting system (RWHS). The construction of an efficient RWHS requires a thorough analysis of the rainwater quality and the appropriate treatment process for its intended use. In line with this, a bibliometric and comprehensive review of studies related to roof rainwater harvesting was conducted. A corpus of 1123 articles was downloaded from the Scopus database and parsed through the CorText Manager to determine the relationships between keywords, journals, and topics related to rainwater harvesting. A comprehensive analysis was also conducted to determine the different designs of RWHS, the quality of harvested rainwater from roof catchments, the efficiency of the system for specific purposes, and its sustainability in terms of economic, environmental, and social aspects. Results show that the effectiveness of a RWHS heavily depends on its installation site, the physicochemical characteristics of the harvested rainwater, and the acceptability of the end users. An effective water treatment process is essential for achieving better water quality for harvested rainwater. Moreover, assessing the financial viability and return on investment of an RWHS is necessary.

Financial Aspects of Sustainable Rainwater Management in Small-Scale Urban Housing Communities

“…A recent paper by Jin et al [81] underlines that national and financial policies promoting rainwater harvesting systems should be available to ensure the economic profitability of these systems and to increase the acceptance of the potential investors and their users' willingness-to-pay. The required community acceptance for rainwater harvesting designs, highly related to the economic issues of such systems, was also underlined as a social aspect of sustainable rainwater management [82]. Thus, in our opinion, a detailed cost-efficiency and benefits-costs analysis, based on the measurable financial expenditures and benefits, should be introduced for each single design, under the precisely identified and qualified local economic and climatic conditions and in order to ensure the mentioned social acceptance.…”

“…The degree of implementation of LID systems varies significantly between different countries all over the world [68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84]. The use of low-impact solutions very often requires additional investment and/or operating costs compared to conventional designs, which may be one of the factors affecting the limited application of these systems.…”

Ground-Runoff Harvesting to Increase Water Availability in Isolated Households on Hilly Mediterranean Islands: A Case Study in a Micro-Catchment of Ibiza (Spain)

“…In the Balearic Islands, aljibe-like storage systems are now mandatory for all new private buildings [19]. The collection and storage of rooftop rainwater is possibly the most popular harvesting technique [18,20,21], but the limited areal surface of private houses' rooftops is typically not sufficient to generate sufficient volumes to balance out the water consumptions of these properties.…”