Investigation on life cycle assessment of centralised wastewater treatment, and its upgrading using LCA

Abstract

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are designed and operated to prevent pollution to the environment by removing a variety of contaminants from wastewater before discharge. However, the pollutants in wastewater could be transferred to air such as greenhouse gases (GHGs) emission, to water by pollutants in the effluent, and to soil such as disposal of sludge due to wastewater treatment which could lead to negative effects on human health and the environment. The holistic environmental impact from WWTPs is very challenging to evaluate, and thus, a cradle-to-grave approach such as by life cycle assessment (LCA) is needed to analyse the consequences of WWTP’s operation to the environment. However, due to the limitation in the life cycle steps, (e.g. lacking of complete local databases of WWTPs), continuous research involving LCA application in wastewater treatment is essential for the improvement of the existing LCA methodology. Thus, it is important to investigate if the potential factors such as rainfall, local toxic pollutants, and the integration of technologies to upgrade existing WWTPs could affect the operation of municipal WWTP and the environmental impacts. The aim of this work is to assess the life cycle impact of large centralised WWTPs based on the extended and comprehensive local databases for the improvement of LCA methodology and towards sustainable operation of wastewater treatment. The complete life cycle inventories based on the existing operation of the selected municipal WWTPs in Malaysia and the UK, were primarily established. Environmental impacts were assessed using LCA to understand the environmental burdens based on three different objectives in the three chapters which are Chapter 3, Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.

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ORCID for Yongqiang Liu: orcid.org/0000-0001-9688-1786

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