Life Cycle Assessment of water treatment: what is the contribution of infrastructure and operation at unit process level?

Igos, Elorri; Dalle, Alice; Tiruta-Barna, Ligia; Benetto, Enrico; Baudin, I.; Mery, Yoann

doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2013.07.061

Cited by 62 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…This was determined by validation of the model with real capital and operational costs of a large number of full scale installations for drinking water production in the Netherlands that actually have been built and are in operation. A life cycle analysis (LCA) can be used to determine the environmental impact of urban water systems [30] and water treatment processes [31][32][33][34][35]. An impact calculation was made by applying SimaPro 8 software, applying the ReCiPe endpoint (E) [36] and impact data from the EcoInvent 3.0 database for consumables (i.e., energy and chemicals).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rainwater Harvesting for Drinking Water Production: A Sustainable and Cost-Effective Solution in The Netherlands?

Hofman‐Caris

Bertelkamp

Waal

et al. 2019

Water

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An increasing number of people want to reduce their environmental footprint by using harvested rainwater as a source for drinking water. Moreover, implementing rainwater harvesting (RWH) enables protection against damage caused by increasing precipitation frequency and intensity, which is predicted for Western Europe. In this study, literature data on rainwater quality were reviewed, and based on Dutch climatological data the usable quantity of rainwater in the Netherlands was calculated. For two specific cases, (1) a densely populated city district and (2) a single house in a rural area, the total costs of ownership (TCO) for decentralized drinking water supply from harvested rainwater was calculated, and a life cycle assessment (LCA) was made. For the single house it was found that costs were very high (€60–€110/m3), and the environmental impact would not decrease. For the city district, costs would be comparable to the present costs of centralized drinking water production and supply, but the environmental benefit is negligible (≤1‰). Furthermore, it was found that the amount of rainwater that can be harvested in the city district only covers about 50% of the demand. It was concluded that the application of rainwater harvesting for drinking water production in the Netherlands is not economically feasible.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rainwater Harvesting for Drinking Water Production: A Sustainable and Cost-Effective Solution in The Netherlands?

Hofman‐Caris

Bertelkamp

Waal

et al. 2019

Water

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“…48 Currently, scientifi c publications related to environmental LCAs does not completely highlight the specifi c contribution of each unit operation to environmental damages, despite the fact that it may lead to better optimizations of process chains. 69 Th is practice begins to emerge on some application fi elds: water treatment, chemical industry 70,71 or metallurgy 72 for instance. Jacquemin et al 51 proposed a review of LCA applied to processes in various sectors; nevertheless it is still not applied to biorefi neries.…”

Section: Comparative Lca Of Alternative Processing Routesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainable design of biorefinery processes: existing practices and new methodology

Julio

Albet

Vialle

et al. 2017

Biofuels Bioprod Bioref

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Nowadays, eco‐designing products is increasingly practiced. The next challenge for sustainability is to optimize production processes. Biorefineries are particularly concerned with this improvement, because they use renewable resources. To identify the contribution of transformation processes to the overall environmental impacts, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) appears as the adequate method. A literature review highlights that LCA is mainly performed on biorefineries to compare biomass feedstocks between them and to a fossil reference. Another part of environmental LCA compares the impacts of different processing routes. Nevertheless, these evaluations concern already designed processes. Generally, processes are considered as a unique operation in assessments. However, some criteria like operating can notably modify environmental burdens. The eco‐design of biorefinery processes can be guided by coupling process simulation to LCA. This method has been emerging in the chemical sector in recent years. Consequently, this paper proposes a new methodological approach to assessing the complete sustainability of biorefinery processes, since its first design stages. In addition to coupling process simulation and environmental LCA, the other pillars of sustainability will be assessed. Indeed, Life Cycle Costing and Social Life Cycle Assessment can be performed to obtain an integrated methodological framework. The simultaneous optimization of the environmental, economic, and social performances of the process can lead to antagonist ways of improving. Consequently, compromises should be realized. Thereby, the multi‐objective optimization can be accomplished by a metaheuristic method supported by a decision‐making tool. Finally, the main limits of this method and some perspectives and ways for improving are discussed. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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“…In this paper the terms 'embodied carbon' and 'embodied impacts' are also used to refer to embodied CO2e. compared to operational carbon (Igos et al, 2014;Bonton et al, 2012); however, a few papers have suggested it is important with embodied CO2e effected from system construction and chemical use accounting for 30-40 % of the whole life cycle impacts (Mo et al, 2010;Stokes and Horvath 2010a;2010b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The significance of measuring embodied carbon dioxide equivalent in water sector infrastructure

Georgiou

Raffin

Colquhoun

et al. 2019

Journal of Cleaner Production

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For the water sector to cope with rising populations and the anticipated impacts of climate change, increasing amounts of construction output are needed to build water-related infrastructure. Amidst emerging operational energy efficiencies and gradual grid decarbonisation, the relative impact and extent of embodied carbon dioxide equivalent (embodied CO2e) effected from the construction and maintenance of water sector infrastructure is likely to rise. For practitioners in the water and construction sectors, there is a growing need to be able to understand and account for embodied CO2e. However, the contribution of embodied CO2e as part of the whole life cycle impacts of water related infrastructure is disputed in the current literature, and with only a handful of studies suggesting it is important its significance is not established. This work aims to explore this issue, and provide clarity. This paper shows the calculations involved to measure the embodied and operational CO2e of Old Ford Water Recycling Plant, a small blackwater recycling treatment facility producing 574 m 3 /day of reclaimed water. For the analyses, embodied carbon dioxide coefficients (ECCs) are used that were provided by the water operator Thames Water Utilities Ltd (TWU), and based on its supply chain, and datasets from Ecoinvent v3.1, a commercially available assessment tool. The final aggregated carbon footprint values calculated are 1.430 kgCO2e (TWU in-house analysis) and 1.566 kgCO2e (Ecoinvent) per cubic metre of recycled water. The results show that the contribution of embodied CO2e is significant, making up 50.7 % (TWU) and 77.3 % (Ecoinvent) of the total carbon footprint value in each analysis. The research identified that assessments could be improved if there was higher-quality data provided by manufacturers and suppliers on the embodied CO2e content of materials, components, and equipment. This paper further illustrates differences between calculations using generic data (Ecoinvent) and supply chain data, and the difficulties involved in producing functionally equivalent life cycle inventories.

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Life Cycle Assessment of water treatment: what is the contribution of infrastructure and operation at unit process level?

Cited by 62 publications

References 19 publications

Rainwater Harvesting for Drinking Water Production: A Sustainable and Cost-Effective Solution in The Netherlands?

Rainwater Harvesting for Drinking Water Production: A Sustainable and Cost-Effective Solution in The Netherlands?

Sustainable design of biorefinery processes: existing practices and new methodology

The significance of measuring embodied carbon dioxide equivalent in water sector infrastructure

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