Introducing demand to supply ratio as a new metric for understanding life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from rainwater harvesting systems

Devkota, Jay; Burian, Steven J.; Tavakol-Davani, Hassan; Apul, Defne

doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.10.073

Cited by 13 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Among different decentralized techniques, Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) is of a particular interest due to the following reasons: (i) it is able to supply water demands in buildings using the captured rainwater (Sample and Liu 2014;Devkota et al 2015); (ii) it is capable of managing CSOs with significant lower life cycle costs than the centralized techniques (Tavakol-Davani et al 2015); (iii) relatively, it can be easily applied by building owners rather than some other decentralized techniques, such as pervious pavements. These benefits have led to an increasing interest regarding the RWH studies in the urban water management discipline.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How does climate change affect combined sewer overflow in a system benefiting from rainwater harvesting systems?

Goharian

Hansen

Tavakol-Davani

et al. 2016

Sustainable Cities and Society

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Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) infrastructure are conventionally designed based on historical climatedata. Yet, variability in rainfall intensities and patterns caused by climate change have a significant impact on the performance of an urban drainage system. Although rainwater harvesting (RWH) is a potential solution to manage stormwater in urban areas, its benefits in mitigating the climate change impacts on combined sewer networks have not been assessed yet. Hence, the goal of the present study was set to evaluate the effectiveness of RWH in alleviating the potential impacts of climate change on CSOs. To do so, first, future rainfall was achieved through the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) based on modified historical record. Then, rainfall-runoff modeling was employed using the U.S. EPA Stormwater management model (SWMM) to study the response of CSO outfalls to future rainfall. The study site was the combined sewer network of the City of Toledo, Ohio. Results showed that under the maximum impact scenario in the near future, climate change might cause up to approximately 12-18% increase in CSOs occurrence, volume and duration in Toledo. However, an RWH plan with the capacity of 0.76 m 3 (200 Gallon) implemented on half on the buildings throughout the area, appeared to be able to mitigate the potential future impacts, and showed a remarkable controlling performance in the peak flow periods. This plan also met toilet flushing demands. Therefore, RWH can be considered as a feasible solution to mitigate future climate change impacts on CSOs and supply water demands.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How does climate change affect combined sewer overflow in a system benefiting from rainwater harvesting systems?

Goharian

Hansen

Tavakol-Davani

et al. 2016

Sustainable Cities and Society

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“…Assuming when the harvested rainfall from RWH systems is used to meet indoor demands, there will be a direct reduction on the target supply volume for WTP. A 75-year analysis period was considered since it is recommended as the average building life cycle and is used in other RWH studies [18]. Replacement of RWH components during this analysis period was considered as listed in Table 1.…”

Section: Lca Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, it may represent watershed-scale outcomes of different climatic, anthropogenic, and other scenario conditions [15][16][17] LCA can provide a complement to hydrologic analysis to enable more holistic decision-making by modeling all life cycle phases of the infrastructure (e.g., manufacturing of the materials and operation of the infrastructure) and by considering a broader set of sustainability criteria. However, most studies are limited to building-scale infrastructure without including hydrologic assessment at the watershed scale [6,8,[18][19][20][21][22]. Given the recent movement toward the watershed-scale LCA of urban drainage practices [12,23], making a transition to a more cohesive hydrologic-LCA analysis is appropriate.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Combining Hydrologic Analysis and Life Cycle Assessment Approaches to Evaluate Sustainability of Water Infrastructure: Uncertainty Analysis

Tavakol-Davani

Rahimi

Burian

et al. 2019

Water

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The goal of this research is identifying major sources of uncertainty of an environmentally-sustainable urban drainage infrastructure design, based on hydrologic analysis and life cycle assessment (LCA). The uncertainty analysis intends to characterize and compare relative roles of unreliability, incompleteness, technological difference, and spatial and temporal variation in life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) data, as well as natural variability in hydrologic data. Uncertainties are analyzed using a robust Monte Carlo simulation approach, performed by High Throughput Computing (HTC) and interpreted by Morse-Scale regression models. The uncertainty analysis platform is applied to a watershed-scale LCA of rainwater harvesting systems (RWH) to control combined sewer overflows (CSOs). To consider the watershed-scale implications, RWH is simulated to serve for both the water supply and CSO control in an urban watershed in Toledo, Ohio, USA. Results suggest that, among the studied parameters, rainfall depth (as a hydrologic parameter) caused more than 86% of the uncertainty, while only 7% of the uncertainty was caused by LCIA parameters. Such an emphasis on the necessity of robust hydrologic data and associated analyses increase the reliability of LCA-based urban water infrastructure design. In addition, results suggest that such a topology-inspired model is capable of rendering an optimal RWH system capacity as a function of annual rainfall depth. Specifically, if the system could capture 1/40th of annual rainfall depth in each event from rooftops, the RWH system would be optimal and, thus, lead to minimized life cycle impacts in terms of global warming potential (GWP) and aquatic eco-toxicity (ETW). This capture depth would be around 2.1 cm for Toledo (given an 85 cm/year rainfall and 200 m2 typical roof area), which could be achieved through an RWH system with 4.25 m3 capacity per household, assuming a uniform plan for the entire studied watershed. Capacities smaller than this suggested optimal value would likely result in loss of RWH potable water treatment savings and CSO control benefits, while capacities larger than the optimal would likely incur an excessive wastewater treatment burden and construction phase impacts of RWH systems.

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“…Angrill et al (2017) showed that the tank location (tank distributed over the roof and underground tank) and distribution strategy (shared laundry, supply to the nearest apartments, and distribution throughout the analysis showed that the commercial rainwater harvesting system performed better than (<40%) or equivalent to (45% to 55%) the municipal water supply system in all impact categories except ozone depletion. Devkota et al (2017) found that the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of using rainwater harvesting system in an office building depends upon relative use of the system and whether a separate or combined sewer is in place: when the demand to supply ratio was smaller than 1, the emissions from rainwater harvesting systems were higher in combined sewer systems than in separate sewer systems. When demand to supply ratio was larger than or equal to 1, combined and separate sewers behave the same for rainwater harvesting systems.…”

Section: Quality At Least Six Papers In 2017 Addressedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Stormwater Characterization, Control and Treatment

Moore

Rodak

Ahmed

et al. 2018

Water Environment Research

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A review of literature related to stormwater runoff characterization and its subsequent management and treatment from 2017 was conducted. The 250 articles summarized herein are organized along three central themes: (1) stormwater quality and quantity characteristics, (2) site-scale stormwater management practices, with a focus on low impact development (LID) and green infrastructure (GI), and (3) watershed-scale performance of stormwater controls. Within each section, common research themes and future work are highlighted.

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Introducing demand to supply ratio as a new metric for understanding life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from rainwater harvesting systems

Cited by 13 publications

References 30 publications

How does climate change affect combined sewer overflow in a system benefiting from rainwater harvesting systems?

How does climate change affect combined sewer overflow in a system benefiting from rainwater harvesting systems?

Combining Hydrologic Analysis and Life Cycle Assessment Approaches to Evaluate Sustainability of Water Infrastructure: Uncertainty Analysis

Urban Stormwater Characterization, Control and Treatment

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