Water reuse usually gets pitched as a fix for drought. A webinar on December 4 makes a different case: that places with plenty of water, the Mid-Atlantic included, have their own reasons to recycle it, and that the right rules and the right money are what decide whether they do.
The Water Center at Penn and the WateReuse Association are hosting an online webinar, “Regulatory and Financial Incentives for Water Reuse in the Greater Mid-Atlantic: Policy Lessons from New York City,” on Friday, December 4, 2026, from noon to 1:00 p.m. Eastern. It looks at how policy can push water reuse forward in a traditionally water-rich region, using New York City’s programs as the case study. Register through the link below.
What water reuse is, and why a water-rich region would bother
Water reuse means capturing water that has already served a purpose, from a building’s drains, a stormwater system, or a treatment plant, cleaning it to the right standard, and putting it back to work. Depending on how far the treatment goes, reused water can irrigate land, cool equipment, flush toilets, or recharge an aquifer, all without drawing more fresh water from a river or a well. Most of the country hears about reuse in the context of the dry Southwest, where the alternative is running out. The webinar starts from a different premise, the one it states plainly: reuse brings benefits to water providers and their customers that go well beyond scarcity. For a place like ours, that is the point worth sitting with. Recycling water can cut what a plant discharges back into a stream, ease the load on aging treatment systems, and free up supply for new demand, the data centers now shopping the region among it, without a utility having to tap a new source.
What the webinar covers, and who is on it
The technology for water reuse mostly exists already. What decides whether a project gets built is usually policy: the regulations that set what reused water may be used for and how clean it has to be, and the financial incentives that make the numbers add up. This session takes on both, with a close look at the programs run by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, one of the more active agencies in the region at writing reuse into its rules. Howard Neukrug, executive director of the Water Center at Penn, moderates. The panel brings Alan Cohn, a senior policy and science advisor in the New York City agency’s Bureau of Sustainability, alongside Nancy Choi and Rick Petrosino of Natural Systems Utilities, a firm that builds and runs reuse systems. The hour is aimed squarely at the people who shape these decisions: policymakers, regulators, water system managers, developers, and researchers.
What it offers our basin
The Upper Ohio Basin is exactly the kind of place this webinar is talking to: water-rich, and not used to thinking of reuse as its problem to solve. That is changing. Every gallon a plant or a building recycles is a gallon it does not draw from the Mon, the Allegheny, or the Yough, and that math starts to matter as data centers and new development push demand up. The catch is the one the session names: reuse happens when the rules allow it and the money supports it, and it stalls when they do not. New York City is close enough, in climate and in plumbing, that its playbook is worth a look here rather than a shrug. For anyone helping to write a local water plan or review a permit, an hour on how a wet-climate agency moved the policy is an hour well spent. Register, bring your questions, and bring what you learn back to the table.
Details from the Water Center at Penn event listing for its webinar, “Regulatory and Financial Incentives for Water Reuse in the Greater Mid-Atlantic: Policy Lessons from New York City,” Friday, December 4, 2026, noon to 1:00 p.m. Eastern, held online and co-hosted with the WateReuse Association. Speakers as listed by the Water Center. Current as of November 12, 2026.
