Abstract
Decentralized wastewater treatment technology, especially natural ecological treatment technology has widely been used in rural regions. In this paper, a comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) of a typical wastewater ecological treatment technology - artificial wetland technology was conducted. SimaPro software was applied to simulate the wastewater treatment facility, and the CML2 baseline2000 impact evaluation method was selected to analyze the environmental loads and benefits during the life cycle. The environmental impact of the facility adopting grey-black separation mode is compared with that of the unified collection and treatment model to provide scientific basis and suggestions for the selection of wastewater collection and treatment model. The results indicated that the main environmental impact of the Southeast University artificial wetland system comes from the construction and operation of the artificial wetland and aeration tank. Marine water ecotoxicity is the main impact factor, followed by freshwater water ecotoxicity.
Highlights
With the urbanization of the world and the increasing amount of domestic water, the construction of municipal wastewater treatment facilities gradually accelerated, which leads to the relatively higher treatment rate of urban wastewater
The results show that STW with direct land application is the most costeffective scenario, which is characterized by the lowest environmental impact
While the part that mainly causes the impact of abiotic depletion is the construction and operation of the constructed wetland, and the reason is that the main construction material type of the constructed wetland is light concrete
Summary
With the urbanization of the world and the increasing amount of domestic water, the construction of municipal wastewater treatment facilities gradually accelerated, which leads to the relatively higher treatment rate of urban wastewater. Life cycle assessment (LCA) had been applied to the environmental impact of different domestic wastewater treatment technologies. Suh et al (2002) carried out LCA in order to compare the environmental impacts of five alternative treatment scenarios of sewage sludge in the French context. The study result showed the combination of anaerobic digestion and agricultural land application was most environmentally friendly tanks to less emissions and less consumption of energy. Enrica et al (2011) investigated and compared technical, economic and environmental aspects of four scenarios of sludge treatment wetlands (STW) : 1) STW with direct land application of biosolids, 2) STW with compost post-treatment, 3) centrifuge with compost post-treatment and 4) sludge transport to an intensive wastewater treatment plant. Corbella et al (2017) carried out LCA to assess the environmental impact of microbial fuel cells implemented in constructed wetlands. Comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) of rural decentralized wastewater treatment technologies was seldom performed
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