Study of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) on Water Treatment

Abstract

Water Treatment Plant (WTP) with conventional systems uses pumps that work for 24 hours, and chemicals that produce residues or by-products in water processing and have an impact on the environment and humans. This study aims to identify the quality and performance of the WTP treatment, Identify the impacts arising from the drinking water treatment process and determine the efforts made to reduce the impacts identified by the method Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method is an assessment method regarding potential environmental impacts and evaluation of the environmental performance of a process to the product. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) consists of four stages, are Goal and Scope determination, Life Cycle Inventory, Life Cycle Impact Assessment, and data interpretation. The software used in SimaPro 9.0.0 with the impact assessment method is CML-IA Baseline. The impacts discussed in this research are Global Warming, Human Toxicity, and Eutrophication. The way to reduce the impact is based on literature studies. The results of the analysis found that the quality of raw water has not reach the quality standards as drinking water standards. While the quality of produced water has reached the quality standard. The performance of the processing unit at WTP has not worked well, therefore needs improvement with the addition of polymer in clearator, electricity usage in WTP is 11.220.195,47 kWh/year. The analysis results using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method, showed that the highest contribution to environmental impact was Eutrophication of 287.644,1 kg PO4--eq/year followed by Global Warming of 23.697.275 kg CO2eq/year, and Human Toxicity of 9.190.241 kg 1,4-DBeq/year. The way to reduce the impact is to take pretreatment on raw water, plan and build sludge treatment, also recycle sludge from clearator unit, replace equipment, replace aluminum sulfate, and liquid chlorine into PAC and hypochlorite salts.