LCA as a Decision Support Tool for the Environmental Improvement of the Operation of a Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant

Pasqualino, Jorgelina; Meneses, Montse; Abella, Montserrat; Castells, Francesc

doi:10.1021/es802056r

Cited by 173 publications

(104 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Life cycle assessment (LCA) is one of the most accepted evaluation tools in the framework of sustainability, as it enables to estimate the cumulative environmental impacts of a product or a process from 'cradle to grave' (Pasqualino et al, 2009). It may provide an accurate picture of the true environmental trade-offs when selecting technology or process among different options.…”

Section: Life Cycle Assessment (Lca)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing the ecological sanitation: a review on technology and methods

Fan

Wang

et al. 2016

Journal of Cleaner Production

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a b s t r a c tWastewater often contains valuable resources (e.g. organic matter and nutrients). Different from conventional sanitation approaches, the ecological sanitation (Eco-San) system is based on the closure of material flow cycles to recover resources with minimized demands on other resources. The review comprehensively summarized the main components of the Eco-San system (user interface, collection and conveyance, storage and primary treatment, and reuse/disposal), the frequently-used evaluation methods, and the framework of evaluation index system. Some typical practical cases were discussed to demonstrate the managerial implications and popularize the applications of the Eco-San system. The results show that the Eco-San systems are beneficial to resource efficiency, agricultural use of the organic matters and nutrients, and energy recovery although some shortages exist (e.g. high cost, cultural constraints, and complex operation and management). The evaluation methods can help to identify the restriction factors, contributing factors and measures to improve the efficiency of the future Eco-San system. The setting, selection and quantification are three critical steps when using the evaluation indices to complete the evaluation process. This study not only provides the methods for both developing novel Eco-San systems (combinations of the components) and improving the Eco-San systems (evaluation of the combinations) to solve the wastewater problem in rural areas. Considering the challenges or limitations in the Eco-San research, the recommendations for future research may mainly focus on the combination of different components, methods for sustainability assessment, quantification of the evaluation index, and implementation of more real Eco-San cases.

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Section: Life Cycle Assessment (Lca)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing the ecological sanitation: a review on technology and methods

Fan

Wang

et al. 2016

Journal of Cleaner Production

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“…However, the generation and transmission of the electricity used in the plant, the production of the chemicals used in the anoxic reactors to improve denitrification and the transportation of the generated sludge to its final destination have been included in the boundaries. The sludge considered is used in agriculture as a fertilizer, this application being one of the most common in Spain [16]. …”

Section: Definition Of the Goal And Scopementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The most common chemical fertilizers used in Europe are calcium ammonium nitrate (N-based) and triple superphosphate (P-based) [46]. The substitutability was assumed as 6.93 kg of triple superphosphate and 39.6 kg of calcium ammonium nitrate per ton of sludge [16].…”

Section: Inventory Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This characterization model provides the characterization factors that quantify the environmental impacts of the released emissions in the corresponding impact categories. From an available wide set of impact categories, the following seven ones have been selected to perform this study, taking into account that they are commonly used in wastewater LCA studies [1,15,16]. The selected impact categories are: Acidification Potential (ADP), Global Warming Potential (GWP), Eutrophication Potential (EP), Terrestrial Ecotoxicity Potential (TAETP), Photochemical Oxidation (PHO), Depletion of Abiotic Resources (DAR) and Ozone Depletion Potential (ODP).…”

Section: Impact Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Joint Environmental and Economical Analysis of Wastewater Treatment Plants Control Strategies: A Benchmark Scenario Analysis

2016

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Abstract:In this paper, a joint environmental and economic analysis of different Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) control strategies is carried out. The assessment is based on the application of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a method to evaluate the environmental impact and the Benchmark Simulation Model No. 1 (BSM1). The BSM1 is taken as the benchmark scenario used to implement the control strategies. The Effluent Quality Index (EQI) and the Overall Cost Index (OCI) are two indicators provided by BSM1 and used to evaluate the plant's performance from the effluent quality and the economic points of view, respectively. This work conducts a combined analysis and assessment of ten different control strategies defined to operate a wastewater treatment plant. This analysis includes the usual economic and performance indexes provided by BSM1 joined with the LCA analysis that determines the environmental impact linked to each one of the considered control strategies. It is shown how to get an overall evaluation of the environmental effects by using a normalized graphical representation that can be easily used to compare control strategies from the environmental impact point of view. The use of only the BSM1 indexes provides an assessment that leads to a clustering of control strategies according to the cost/quality tradeoff they show. Therefore, regarding the cost/quality tradeoff, all strategies in the same group are almost equal and do not provide an indication on how to proceed in order to select the appropriate one. It is therefore shown how the fact of adding a new, complementary, evaluation (LCA based) allows either to reinforce a decision that could be taken solely on the basis of the EQI/OCI tradeoff or to select one control strategy among the others.

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“…For the wastewater-related issues (WRIs), this method can be used to evaluate or critique the changes that are taking place (Bai et al 2017b;Corominas et al 2013;Gabarrell et al 2012;Hellweg and Canals 2014;Lassaux et al 2007;Zhao et al 2017). The related LCA studies include the improvement of the operation of municipal wastewater plant (Pasqualino et al 2009), the comparison of alternative wastewater sludge treatment systems (Suh and Rousseaux 2002), and the development of technologies for wastewater recycling (Choe et al 2015). When implementing LCA, an important purpose is to derive optimization strategies or recommendations to improve the environmental performance of WRI.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Set organic pollution as an impact category to achieve more comprehensive evaluation of life cycle assessment in wastewater-related issues

Zhao

Yang

2017

Environ Sci Pollut Res

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For wastewater-related issues (WRI), life cycle assessment (LCA) is often used to evaluate environmental impacts and derive optimization strategies. To promote the application of LCA for WRI, it is critical to incorporate local impact of water pollutants. Organic pollution, a main type of water pollution, has not been given much consideration in current LCA systems. This paper investigates the necessity of setting a regionalized impact category to reflect the local impact of organic pollution. A case study is conducted concerning an upgraded wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) in China, which is assumed to meet different sewage control strategies. Chemical oxygen demand (COD) is selected to represent the organic pollution and treated as an individual impact category. CML 2002 is used to quantify the environmental impacts of different strategies. Results show that abnormal LCA results are generated with the traditional eutrophication impact category, and after the introduction of COD, more reasonable LCA results are obtained, making the entire comparison of different control strategies more meaningful and compelling. Moreover, BEES, Ecovalue 08, and Chinese factors are adopted here as different weighting methods. Different weighting results exhibited various trade-offs for the increasingly strict control strategies; the results of BEES and Ecovalue08 underlined the potential environmental burden, but the results of Chinese factors only emphasized the local environmental improvement. It is concluded that setting regionalized impact category for organic pollution can make LCA results more reasonable in wastewater treatment, especially in evaluating Chinese cases because of the serious water pollution caused by large quantities of COD emission.

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LCA as a Decision Support Tool for the Environmental Improvement of the Operation of a Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant

Cited by 173 publications

References 18 publications

Constructing the ecological sanitation: a review on technology and methods

Constructing the ecological sanitation: a review on technology and methods

Joint Environmental and Economical Analysis of Wastewater Treatment Plants Control Strategies: A Benchmark Scenario Analysis

Set organic pollution as an impact category to achieve more comprehensive evaluation of life cycle assessment in wastewater-related issues

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