Global and local health burden trade-off through the hybridisation of quantitative microbial risk assessment and life cycle assessment to aid water management

Kobayashi, Yumi; Peters, Gregory; Ashbolt, Nicholas J.; Heimersson, Sara; Svanström, Magdalena; Khan, Stuart J.

doi:10.1016/j.watres.2015.03.015

Cited by 29 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…23 To better understand the health implications of disinfection system design and operational decisions, a hybridized LCA and QMRA methodology can be established by leveraging the common unit of Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs). 24 This approach was recently used to quantify the human health impacts of different flow regimes at several water reclamation plants 24 and could offer insights into the selection and development of disinfection technologies for water reuse.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human health trade-offs in the disinfection of wastewater for landscape irrigation: microplasma ozonation vs. chlorination

Dong

Kim

et al. 2017

Environ. Sci.: Water Res. Technol.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human health trade-offs in the disinfection of wastewater for landscape irrigation: microplasma ozonation vs. chlorination

Dong

Kim

et al. 2017

Environ. Sci.: Water Res. Technol.

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“…To the best of our knowledge, only four studies exist which couple LCA and QMRA for quantifying health risks of water systems [12][13][14][15]. Harder et al assessed the health risks of sewage sludge management [13,14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Harder et al assessed the health risks of sewage sludge management [13,14]. Kobayashi et al quantified the health risks of a large-scale water recycling project in Sydney [15]. Anastasopoulou et al investigated the health risks of self-sustained sanitation systems in South Africa [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing Health Impacts of Conventional Centralized and Emerging Resource Recovery-Oriented Decentralized Water Systems

Romeiko

2020

IJERPH

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Energy shortage and climate change call for sustainable water and wastewater infrastructure capable of simultaneously recovering energy, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, and protecting public health. Although energy and greenhouse gas emissions of water and wastewater infrastructure are extensively studied, the human health impacts of innovative infrastructure designed under the principles of decentralization and resource recovery are not fully understood. In order to fill this knowledge gap, this study assesses and compares the health impacts of three representative systems by integrating life cycle and microbial risk assessment approaches. This study found that the decentralized system options, such as on-site septic tank and composting or urine diverting toilets, presented much lower life cycle cancer and noncancer impacts than the centralized system. The microbial risks of decentralized systems options were also lower than those of the centralized system. Moreover, life cycle cancer and noncancer impacts contributed to approximately 95% of total health impacts, while microbial risks were associated with the remaining 5%. Additionally, the variability and sensitivity assessment indicated that reducing energy use of wastewater treatment and water distribution is effective in mitigating total health damages of the centralized system, while reducing energy use of water treatment is effective in mitigating total health damages of the decentralized systems.

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“…incineration of sewage sludge with subsequent phosphorus recovery). Also, it would be of interest to find out whether the comparison of individual exposures with corresponding thresholds and the overall impact associated with the exposure of a whole population point towards a similar set of chemical contaminants of concern (Lim et al 2011) or to consider tradeoff relationships between local impacts related to chemical contaminants or pathogens and global impacts related to other stressors (Kobayashi et al 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating human toxicity potential of land application of sewage sludge: the effect of modelling choices

Harder

Peters

Svanström

et al. 2016

Int J Life Cycle Assess

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Purpose Many municipalities are facing increasing pressure to adapt solid waste and wastewater management infrastructures in order to better close nutrient cycles. The focus of this study is on the estimation of the human toxicity potential associated with chemical contaminants released upon the application of sewage sludge to agricultural land. More specifically, this study investigated the effect of modelling choices regarding fate and exposure assessment. Methods Monitoring data were collected for contaminants present in the sewage sludge from the wastewater treatment plant in Gothenburg and from other municipal wastewater treatment plants in Sweden. Based on these monitoring data, an overall burden of disease was estimated using characterisation factors taken from the USEtox models (versions 1.01 and 2.0). For the exposure through vegetables, an alternative life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) model was developed. The intake fractions thus obtained were used in combination with human health effect factors taken from the USEtox 2.0 database. The model results were compared with the USEtox models, and whether these two versions of the USEtox model provide significantly different results was also examined. The potential relevance of accidental ingestion of sludge was also considered.Results and discussion The different LCIA models provided burden of disease estimates that differed from one another for individual contaminants (up to five orders of magnitude). The aggregated burdens of disease (i.e. sum for all contaminants considered in this study) estimated through different model variants, however, were of the same order of magnitude. For both metals and organic contaminants, only a small set of contaminants was found to make significant contributions to the aggregate burden of disease. However, it is uncertain whether the 15 metals and 106 organic contaminants covered by this study are those of greatest health significance of all contaminants potentially present in sewage sludge. Conclusions and recommendationsThe results of this study indicate that the technical information provided by the various approaches to modelling human toxicity in life cycle assessment (LCA) in the context of land application of sewage sludge management is consistent on the whole. However, given the uncertainties associated with the assessment of human toxicity in LCA, it is important to also contemplate the extent to which LCA in general is capable of informing the sewage sludge debate when it comes to human toxicity and possibly also other indicators. Future research could focus on identifying which types of questions of interest in the context of sewage management can be answered by LCA and which cannot.

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Global and local health burden trade-off through the hybridisation of quantitative microbial risk assessment and life cycle assessment to aid water management

Cited by 29 publications

References 43 publications

Human health trade-offs in the disinfection of wastewater for landscape irrigation: microplasma ozonation vs. chlorination

Human health trade-offs in the disinfection of wastewater for landscape irrigation: microplasma ozonation vs. chlorination

Assessing Health Impacts of Conventional Centralized and Emerging Resource Recovery-Oriented Decentralized Water Systems

Estimating human toxicity potential of land application of sewage sludge: the effect of modelling choices

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