Jillian Maxcy-Brown is a Graduate Research Assistant in the Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Alabama. She earned a B.S. in Engineering with a Civil Engineering concentration from LeTourneau University in 2019. Her research primarily focuses on water and wastewater treatment technologies for underserved, low-resource communities. She is the lead student on an EPA P3 funded project investigating the potential of Cryptosporidium capture in sewage impacted waters in Alabama. She recently completed a consultancy with Global Communities to conduct a landscape analysis of gaps in sanitation equity throughout the U.S.

Wastewater affordability has become a pressing concern in the U.S. as the cost of collecting and treating wastewater continues to rise rapidly and reports have revealed that millions of residents are currently experiencing a lack of access to proper wastewater management. The U.S. Environmental Project Agency (EPA) has established household affordability metrics based on median household income (MHI) with 2.5% for the upper bound of wastewater affordability for the national MHI (2.0% for water affordability). Affordability discussions have typically focused on monthly billing, an approach that does not incorporate the 25% of households in the U.S. that are not connected to networked sewer systems. Such decentralized users are responsible for managing their wastewater with onsite wastewater treatment systems, including both the ongoing costs for maintaining the system as well as the associated capital cost of the system, the latter of which is typically “hidden” in mortgage or rent payments.

While previous affordability studies have focused on capturing wastewater affordability at the national scale or through the use of indirect data and exclusion of households not connected to networked systems, to the best of our knowledge, this study will be the first to develop state-level wastewater affordability maps that account for both networked and onsite wastewater systems. This study develops wastewater affordability maps for Alabama based on EPA’s guidelines using data from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM), local utilities, the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH), and the U.S. Census Bureau. This study also looks beyond the EPA’s use of MHI (50% of households have a lower income) and proposes the first robust alternative wastewater affordability metrics that account for income inequality.