Towards designing sustainable urban wastewater infrastructures: a screening analysis

Abstract

Whether sustainability can, or should, be defined in a practical operational sense, it is clear that the emergence of such a notion has prompted what seems to be a profound re-thinking of whether our society, economic system, and technology are as we would wish them to be. Sustainable development, clean technology, life-cycle analysis, pollution prevention, and so on, are expressions of a willingness to leave no stone unturned, as it were, in the search for what would be appropriate. With respect to the design and operation of a city's wastewater infrastructure, in particular, this search is characterised by a seeming explosion in the possible combinations of appropriate technologies, gross uncertainty about how novel technologies - only now emerging - might perform in the very long term, and a continuing absence of specific criteria of sustainability for determining the grounds on which any candidate technology might be preferred over another. The paper introduces a simple computational procedure for generating and screening candidate combinations of unit-process technologies for an urban wastewater infrastructure. This is based on the use of Monte Carlo simulation, with the identification of those specific technologies (and combinations thereof) that appear to have the greatest probability of being selected for use under different, possibly evolving, criteria of sustainability. Application of the procedure is illustrated with respect to just a part of this infrastructure, i.e., the wastewater treatment plant.

Participatory Assessment Model (PAM) for the Sustainability of Rural Livelihoods Based on Climate Change

“…Tunstall (1992,1994), Gallopí n (1997), Chen et al (2016), and Ford et al, (2013), have discussed important and major functions for using indicators for the assessment and evaluation of conditions, movements in relation to goals and targets, changes, the effectiveness of adaptation activities; for identification and comparing situations, vulnerabilities, gaps in resilience; for definition of targeted policies; and for anticipation of future circumstances and movements [7], [8]. Similar reasons exist for the importance of using indicators for measuring sustainable livelihoods.…”

Optimizing Selection of Technologies in a Multiple Stage, Multiple Objective Wastewater Treatment System

“…However, any wastewater treatment system (WTS) needs to be designed to meet the economic, environmental, space and performance requirements. The WTS considered here is based on the work of Chen and Beck (), which involves removing the liquid and solid pollutants from domestic wastewater in several levels of processing. This WTS comprises 11 levels of liquid processing and 6 levels of solid processing.…”

Flexible and Robust Implementations of Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines Within a Wastewater Treatment Stochastic Dynamic Program

“…Chen et al 7,8 presented preliminary results for a 10-dimensional wastewater treatment SDP problem. The wastewater treatment SDP model studied in this paper was presented by Tsai et al 9 and is based on the work of Chen and Beck 10 . It involves an 11-level liquid line, and a six-level solid line, and up to 20 continuous state variables that monitor attributes of the liquid and solid.…”