Waste water treatment plant life cycle assessment: treatment process to reuse of water

Abstract

This paper presents a life cycle assessment (LCA) of waste water treatment plant (WWTP) in a university campus in India. Various emissions coming from the WWTP along with their impact factors are analyzed using a LCA software Umberto NXT Universal utilizing Eco-invent database v3.0. It has been found that the recycled water from the plant provides positive impact on the assessed categories. Effect of treatment system is overriding the effect of recycled water in other categories like terrestrial eco-toxicity potential, global warming potential, particulate matter formation, fossil depletion potential, etc. However, the social effect of untreated sewer and environmental effect of compost produced by the system have not been studied.