Abstract
Social impact as growing concern is becoming an important aspect of the design and operation of wastewater treatment processes. A need has arisen for the development of quantitative indicators of social sustainability. Design and operation of wastewater treatment processes additionally require simple and effective methods to represent and understand the interconnections between the indicators of social sustainability. This paper presents an approach for the development of quantitative social sustainability indicators, and introduces a novel method for defining and visualizing indicator interdependence. It outlines equations for quantitative evaluation of health, safety and security, and comfort. Weighting method of the bipartite network of the relations between the indicators and stakeholders enables clear visualization of the interdependencies of the indicators and facilitates simplification of the set of social sustainability criteria. It creates a basis for reduction of amount of data needed for performing the analysis and reducing the social sustainability assessment’s costs.
Highlights
Reliable collection and treatment of wastewater contribute greatly to improvement in global health and sanitation, and a reduction in the spread of diseases [1]
It was mentioned that the data for the validation and calculation of indicators is obtained from the annual reports of the North Toronto Wastewater Treatment Plant
The main novelty of this paper consists in proposing social sustainability criteria specific to wastewater treatment processes, the formulation of indicators enabling their quantitative assessment, the creation of a network of their dependence with stakeholders, as well as determination of the impact of each indicator
Summary
Reliable collection and treatment of wastewater contribute greatly to improvement in global health and sanitation, and a reduction in the spread of diseases [1]. Sustainability – the design and operation of human and industrial systems such that they have minimal negative impact on society, environment and the economy [1] – has become a major goal It means that successful and sustainable wastewater utility shouldn’t only depend on adequate treatment, but it should consider the impacts of their actions on the society and environment [3]. Balkema et al (2002) [5] presented an overview of indicators used for comparison of wastewater treatment systems, while Muga and Mihelcic (2008) [1] provided indicators for holistic assessment of the sustainability of wastewater treatment They came up with an explanation that there should exist method which will enable evaluation of sustainability of wastewater treatment technologies [1]. In case of Molinos-Senante et al (2014) [6], social sustainability was addressed by using qualitative measures for indicators such as odors, noise, visual impact, public acceptance, and complexity
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