LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT APPROACH FOR SUSTAINABILITY OF BIOLOGICAL WASTEWATER TREATMENT METHODS

Abstract

This study shows the comparative analysis of four different wastewater treatment methodologies, amongst which one is a conventional method, which is Activated Sludge Process and other three are advanced and ecofriendly methodologies to perform wastewater treatment. The analysis is carried out on OpenLCA 2.0.0 with the database ecoinvent 3.9.1. The output parameters are generated in the form of impact assessment results and consists of damage categories to indicate the impact on environment. The model followed by the OpenLCA is IMPACT 2002+ approach. Soil Biotechnology results in least environmental impacts on most of the impact assessment and all the damage categories. The life cycle which initiates from extraction of raw materials, construction of treatment plants, operational phase and then disposing the waste generated from each method produces different types of environmental impacts which are essential to be assessed. There are many methods available to perform this analysis, however, this study uses life cycle assessment approach. LCA has been done to evaluate the environmental impacts in different phases of ECW, SBT, ASP and MBR methods of treating wastewater. More than 90% of the chemical oxygen demand (COD) and biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) may be removed with this approach. Additionally, this technology has good proficiency in removing nutrients like nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, total nitrogen, and phosphates. SBT, on the other hand, has low yearly operation and maintenance costs that are lower than traditional or advanced technologies and equivalent to land-based systems. It is found that SBT among all the methods is producing fewest environmental impact with respect to all impact categories except for that of aquatic eutrophication, in which SBT has the highest impact.