Refinement of Life Cycle Assessment Methods for Water and Wastewater Treatment Plant Design

The growing use of Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) in product assessments is also observed in the water and wastewater industry. It is being used increasingly in a wide range of applications from benchmarking Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHGs) to a means of considering multiple environmental impacts in process selection. There are various tools with extensive databases that help with the analysis. However, these databases and methods are mostly applicable to the activities of manufacturing industries. In this paper, the authors describe how they refined a standard LCA methodology to make it applicable to two case studies for wastewater treatment. Others have also started refining the LCA methodology to fit the water and wastewater industries (Corominas et. al. 2011).