Abstract
In this paper, a joint environmental and economic analysis of different Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) control strategies is carried out. The assessment is based on the application of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a method to evaluate the environmental impact and the Benchmark Simulation Model No. 1 (BSM1). The BSM1 is taken as the benchmark scenario used to implement the control strategies. The Effluent Quality Index (EQI) and the Overall Cost Index (OCI) are two indicators provided by BSM1 and used to evaluate the plant’s performance from the effluent quality and the economic points of view, respectively. This work conducts a combined analysis and assessment of ten different control strategies defined to operate a wastewater treatment plant. This analysis includes the usual economic and performance indexes provided by BSM1 joined with the LCA analysis that determines the environmental impact linked to each one of the considered control strategies. It is shown how to get an overall evaluation of the environmental effects by using a normalized graphical representation that can be easily used to compare control strategies from the environmental impact point of view. The use of only the BSM1 indexes provides an assessment that leads to a clustering of control strategies according to the cost/quality tradeoff they show. Therefore, regarding the cost/quality tradeoff, all strategies in the same group are almost equal and do not provide an indication on how to proceed in order to select the appropriate one. It is therefore shown how the fact of adding a new, complementary, evaluation (LCA based) allows either to reinforce a decision that could be taken solely on the basis of the EQI/OCI tradeoff or to select one control strategy among the others.
Highlights
In Europe, the implementation of the Council Directive 91/271/EEC of 21 May 1991 concerning urban wastewater treatment mandates new concepts in management and operation from the adaptation of existing plants that lack robustness and flexibility to adapt to the new requirements
This section conducts the interpretation of the Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs) operation in terms of the indexes and impacts resulting from both the Benchmark Simulation Model No 1 (BSM1) scenario and the application of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method
If we show the behavior of the different control strategies regarding a subset of the selected impact categories (AP, Global Warming Potential (GWP), Eutrophication Potential (EP) and TAEPT) and look at their behavior as members of the grouping arising from the Effluent Quality Index (EQI)/Overall Cost Index (OCI) tradeoff analysis, we can see in Figure 6 that no correlation conclusion can be extracted
Summary
In Europe, the implementation of the Council Directive 91/271/EEC of 21 May 1991 concerning urban wastewater treatment mandates new concepts in management and operation from the adaptation of existing plants that lack robustness and flexibility to adapt to the new requirements. The use of benchmarks is more and more adopted in different scenarios [11] In this respect, WWTP operation is usually conducted on the basis of the usual cost/performance tradeoff, measured in terms of the usual Operation Costs Index (OCI) and Effluent Quality Index (EQI). Due to implementation of the control, the general performance of Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs) has been improved, but the analysis from the environmental point of view has not been detailed sufficiently. This is what raises the intention of this work by proposing to complement the existing water quality measures in terms of pollutants with the analysis of potential impacts that can be performed. In this work, the authors have tried to perform an inventory as complete as possible, performing the quantification of all of the relevant inputs and outputs of the process
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