Life cycle assessment applied to wastewater treatment: State of the art

Full Text
Life-cycle-assessment.pdf embargoed access
Request a copy
When filling the form you are requesting a copy of the article, that is deposited in the institutional repository (DUGiDocs), at the autor or main autor of the article. It will be the same author who decides to give a copy of the document to the person who requests it, if it considers it appropriate. In any case, the UdG Library doesn’t take part in this process because it is not authorized to provide restricted articles.
Share
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a technique to quantify the impacts associated with a product, service or process from cradle-to-grave perspective. Within the field of wastewater treatment (WWT) LCA was first applied in the 1990s. In the pursuit of more environmentally sustainable WWT, it is clear that LCA is a valuable tool to elucidate the broader environmental impacts of design and operation decisions. With growing interest from utilities, practitioners, and researchers in the use of LCA in WWT systems, it is important to make a review of what has been achieved and describe the challenges for the forthcoming years. This work presents a comprehensive review of 45 papers dealing with WWT and LCA. The analysis of the papers showed that within the constraints of the ISO standards, there is variability in the definition of the functional unit and the system boundaries, the selection of the impact assessment methodology and the procedure followed for interpreting the results. The need for stricter adherence to ISO methodological standards to ensure quality and transparency is made clear and emerging challenges for LCA applications in WWT are discussed, including: a paradigm shift from pollutant removal to resource recovery, the adaptation of LCA methodologies to new target compounds, the development of regional factors, the improvement of the data quality and the reduction of uncertainty. Finally, the need for better integration and communication with decision-makers is highlighted ​
​Tots els drets reservats