Design and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)-based Sustainability Evaluation of a Novel Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC)-Integrated Sequencing Batch Reactor (SBR) System

Abstract

Although sewage treatment plants form one of the major environmental interventions for eco-friendly and sustainable management of domestic sanitary wastes, yet their own overall sustainability enhancement, rather than process performance assessment are seldom addressed. The sustainability study of a standard sewage treatment plant, namely Sequencing Batch Reactor (SBR) is addressed in the present research work through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools using SimaPro. Following this, an attempt was made herewith to integrate a potential, yet much lesser commercially explored, wastewater management strategy, namely Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) unto the SBR chamber, with suitable design-modification. The sustainability parameters of the resultant MFC-augment SBR system were also analysed using LCA to compare the effect of this intervention unto the said parameters. The study shows similar normalized trends of overall damage unto sewage as well as sludge, with global warming being the dominant damage cause. Human health was found to be most vulnerable category for both types of SBR’s (namely, with and without MFC), with relatively lower effect in case of MFC-augmented SBR, particularly with regard to infrastructural and short-term domains, in addition to improved water quality and lower water-footprint.