TY - JOUR
T1 - Set organic pollution as an impact category to achieve more comprehensive evaluation of life cycle assessment in wastewater-related issues
AU - Zhao, Xinyue
AU - Yang, Jixian
AU - Ma, Fang
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - For wastewater-related issues (WRI), life cycle assessment (LCA) is often used to evaluate environmental impacts and derive optimization strategies. To promote the application of LCA for WRI, it is critical to incorporate local impact of water pollutants. Organic pollution, a main type of water pollution, has not been given much consideration in current LCA systems. This paper investigates the necessity of setting a regionalized impact category to reflect the local impact of organic pollution. A case study is conducted concerning an upgraded wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) in China, which is assumed to meet different sewage control strategies. Chemical oxygen demand (COD) is selected to represent the organic pollution and treated as an individual impact category. CML 2002 is used to quantify the environmental impacts of different strategies. Results show that abnormal LCA results are generated with the traditional eutrophication impact category, and after the introduction of COD, more reasonable LCA results are obtained, making the entire comparison of different control strategies more meaningful and compelling. Moreover, BEES, Ecovalue 08, and Chinese factors are adopted here as different weighting methods. Different weighting results exhibited various trade-offs for the increasingly strict control strategies; the results of BEES and Ecovalue08 underlined the potential environmental burden, but the results of Chinese factors only emphasized the local environmental improvement. It is concluded that setting regionalized impact category for organic pollution can make LCA results more reasonable in wastewater treatment, especially in evaluating Chinese cases because of the serious water pollution caused by large quantities of COD emission.
AB - For wastewater-related issues (WRI), life cycle assessment (LCA) is often used to evaluate environmental impacts and derive optimization strategies. To promote the application of LCA for WRI, it is critical to incorporate local impact of water pollutants. Organic pollution, a main type of water pollution, has not been given much consideration in current LCA systems. This paper investigates the necessity of setting a regionalized impact category to reflect the local impact of organic pollution. A case study is conducted concerning an upgraded wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) in China, which is assumed to meet different sewage control strategies. Chemical oxygen demand (COD) is selected to represent the organic pollution and treated as an individual impact category. CML 2002 is used to quantify the environmental impacts of different strategies. Results show that abnormal LCA results are generated with the traditional eutrophication impact category, and after the introduction of COD, more reasonable LCA results are obtained, making the entire comparison of different control strategies more meaningful and compelling. Moreover, BEES, Ecovalue 08, and Chinese factors are adopted here as different weighting methods. Different weighting results exhibited various trade-offs for the increasingly strict control strategies; the results of BEES and Ecovalue08 underlined the potential environmental burden, but the results of Chinese factors only emphasized the local environmental improvement. It is concluded that setting regionalized impact category for organic pollution can make LCA results more reasonable in wastewater treatment, especially in evaluating Chinese cases because of the serious water pollution caused by large quantities of COD emission.
KW - Chemical oxygen demand
KW - Life cycle assessment
KW - Wastewater treatment
KW - Weighting method
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85038036734&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:3b198f57-90dd-4e51-926c-d81dd94a96b0
U2 - 10.1007/s11356-017-0895-0
DO - 10.1007/s11356-017-0895-0
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85038036734
SN - 0944-1344
VL - 25
SP - 5960
EP - 5968
JO - Environmental Science and Pollution Research
JF - Environmental Science and Pollution Research
ER -