About

The Wastewater Infrastructure Map was initiated by Chris Campany, Executive Director of the Windham Regional Commission and funded by the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships at the University of Vermont in the fall of 2024. The goal was to create a comprehensive map of wastewater systems including sewer lines, treatment facilities, service areas and service points. A wastewater system, also known as a sewage or sewer system, refers to the infrastructure designed to collect, transport, treat, and dispose of wastewater generated from residential, commercial, and industrial sources. The system typically includes a network of pipes, pumps, lift stations, and treatment facilities that work together to manage and process wastewater before releasing it back into the environment.

At the time of the project the State of Vermont Agency of Natural Resources had a partial map in their Natural Resources Atlas, but there were known gaps in the data. Mr. Campany hoped to both determining the scope of missing data and providing a tool for regional planning commissions and policy makings to understand where systems need creation, expansion or replacement to support housing in Vermont.

In order to complete this project, the Vermont Research Open Source Program Office (VERSO) at the University of Vermont brought together a group of students in paid internships through the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA) program to bring together current maps and digital assets, conduct extensive outreach to towns and treatment systems for missing data and complete the mapping of the entire state.

From the September of 2024 to the end of June 2025, 15 undergraduate students worked for over 2,000 hours to create geospatial datasets and enter them into this GitHub repo, with the goal that the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources would take the completed file and update their atlas. The data creation was completed in June 2025, followed by quality checks of the data to confirm validity as much as possible.

This project consists of 5 layers to paint a picture of wastewater infrastructure in Vermont towns:

More information can be found at data and how to contribute.

Milestones

Contributors

Open Research Community Accelerator Pods

Summer 2024 Team Fall 2024 Team Spring 2025 Team Summer 2025 Team

University Faculty and Staff

State and Local Government

Community

Sustainability Goals

The project aligns with broader state objectives outlined in the Vermont Climate Action Plan, Comprehensive Energy Plan, and Long-Range Transportation Plan, fostering a holistic approach to sustainable growth and resilience. Once completed the dataset should be easy to maintain as the construction or decommissioning of wastewater infrastructure is fairly rare.

For more detailed information, you can visit the GitHub repository and the project page

Outreach and Presentations

The Wastewater Infrastructure Map has been presented at multiple events both as it's own and as part of mutltiple digital public datasets being created through the ORCA program. Presentations include:

Resources and News

There are many resources and new articles about wastewater data resources in Vermont. Here is a list of some (but not all) resources and news articles that may be related:

Related Projects

The Vermont Livability Map was made to bring together multiple datasets to tell a story about how housing can grow in Vermont. This site is under development so it will change as we continue work.

Vermont Zoning Atlas was started in conjunction with the National Zoning Atlas project to convert pdfs into geospatial (and computer readable) datasets. It was made through the effort of almost a hundred volunteer over a year, extensive partnerships and about 100k in grants and 25k in a private donation (which funded the ORCA work). We will be working on version 1.1 this summer to include updates in zoning laws.