Abstract
There is a growing demand for an integrated assessment to identify and select asset management options based on sustainability in the wastewater industry. However, water companies are often not equipped with a rigorous methodology and sufficient resources to perform sustainability assessments. Although many frameworks and tools for sustainability assessment have been developed in academia, practical challenges such as feasibility and usability remain when implementing sustainability assessment methods to support corporate decision-making. This study developed a Multi-Criteria Analysis based framework to evaluate wastewater treatment processes from a sustainability perspective. This study firstly explored the decision and organizational context of a water company with preliminary interviews and then applied the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) with composite scores to evaluate wastewater technologies at a sewage treatment works. The preliminary interviews with stakeholders highlighted that the existing investment decisions were primarily driven by financial cost and compliance whilst calling for a wider consideration of other criteria. A selection of assessment criteria and indicators were then proposed to compare seven treatment technologies at a sewage treatment works. The results of composite scores indicated that the baseline activated sludge process (ASP) was the best option for this study. Experience from the development process highlighted usability, stakeholder engagement and the organizational context should all be considered as part of the design and implementation of the sustainability assessment. The insights from this study provide a valuable practical foundation for applying a multi-criteria approach to perform sustainability assessments and inform asset management decisions in the water company.
Highlights
Water sanitation is a vital service for individual and societal wellbeing
In comparison to the abundance of assessment tools on water quality supply management [34,35], the implementation of similar tools for the wastewater asset management is still limited. In light of such a demand, this study aims to develop and propose a sustainability assessment framework based on a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) approach to assess and compare the sustainability of different wastewater treatment options in a water company based in the United Kingdom
In comparison to the previous MCDA studies, the assessment framework developed in this study needs tion of similar tools for the wastewater asset management is still limited
Summary
Water sanitation is a vital service for individual and societal wellbeing. Approximately 4.2 billion people globally do not have access to safely managed sanitation service [1]. The United Nations has included sustainable management of clean water and sanitation as one of the Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs). 16.6 billion litres of water are delivered to 63.9 million customers every day and the wastewater is collected through almost 400,000 kilometres of sewers and treated at around. 7000 sewage treatment works [2]. Given that the majority of the water supply in the UK is abstracted from surface water sources such as river and reservoir, wastewater treatment is a crucial process to reclaim the quality of wastewater to a safe level to be discharged to the local environment.
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